Is death a happy ending?*

[bending_sickle]

Restlessness by Aritha van Herk (1998)
Synopsis and reviews.


When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
- “Song” by Christina Rossetti

wish you were here
- “Against Travel”, in Dog Sleeps

“Death is a Happy Ending: A dialogue in thirteen parts”
- Figures in a Ground by Robert Kroetsch and Diane Bessai

Dog Sleeps: Irritated Texts by Monty Reid

“I am not a character in a cheap thriller where a detective will break down a door with a bold shoulder, where my body will assume an exotic and silent place at the center of a mystery eventually solved by a slick loner with a penchant for cigarettes and superlative powers of deduction. Elementary, my dear sidekick.

No. I am engaged in an act of hunger, a ravenous plan of escape that I have been working toward for more than a decade. I’m impatient now, more impatient than before, when I pretended to be ready. In Vienna, in the back of a viciously swerving cab. In Jamaica, when I first tasted the sting of ginger beer in the back of my throat. In Brussels, where I finally figured out how.

But always I have waited, listening for the deep going of a moment’s well-tempered agreement, and hesitated. Like Prufrock. Do I dare to eat a peach? Shall I wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled?

Except that I am not afraid.”

“Lest anyone imagine that my impending death is less interesting than how I arrived here, I feel the need to reiterate my happy if substancesless life.”

“But that is part of his profession. He is required to be comforting, for his are the last arms those who choose dying know.”

“All I remember is the maid sitting outside with her feet neatly planted beside each other, waiting for us to finish fighting, to vacate the room. When I came out to use the shower, my feet bare, a fragment of towel around me, she raised her head, but quickly, then lowered her eyes. As if ashamed to acknowledge that she had heard my crying.”

“He nods, accepting my dissatisfaction with the room’s chintzy comfort. ‘It’s too risky. Someone would see us.’

I can’t have that. Can’t take the chance of someone stopping my savior midkill.”

“I’ve read just enough of Dog Sleeps to know its departure, how it calls travel an uninhabited restlessness, a terrible convulsion of some subject searching for a way to inhabit a moment, to declare having been at some somewhere. This could be my hymnal.”

“I read greedily, without much discretion, so long as there are words aligned on pages, narrative with language quirks frequent enough to make me pay attention. No romances, no mysteries. Novels mostly, since short story collections exacerbate my restlessness. One story ends and another begins, that story ends and another begins.”

“My dear one made me want that wind, want to play in it, loose my hair in its tangles. Before he came, the Chinook threw grit into my eyes, refused to enfold me in its arms.”

“I cannot escape myself.

I have tried, tried and tried. And trying, I discovered I was infected with a terrible suspicion of myself and my inability to stay still, my dreadful insomnia of place.”

“And so.

I am alone in a room with the man who has agreed to kill me.”

“Dog Sleeps waves good-bye to ‘the long hiss of departure after departure,’ as if travel were distilled by a moment of leaving, when the feet abandon solid ground and step into a train, walk the ramp onto an airplane. Books can do that, pace out the arrangements, tickets, timing, hotel reservations, packing, driving to the airport, taxi to the train station, every step toward the jigsaw arrival.

Departures begin daily. Taking leave of the very cotton sheets that cover the side of the mattress I sleep on, the floor beside the bed worn by repeated contact with my feet. My arms practice good-bye with their habits, polishing my glass tabletop, pulling thistles from my rock garden, unloading the dishwasher, folding the newspaper exactly in half, grinding the coffee extra fine. Leaving a note for my dear one.

I have taken solace in minutia.”

“That would have been one way to initiate my revised future: unpredictable waves, placid and forgiving once the act is done. But drowning is an act that I have already suffered, not an experience I want to repeat.”

“I drowned as a child, my foot slipping into a deep hole in Buffalo Lake, the sudden engulfment a choking cloak. I drowned and drowned and drowned while around me the shouts of my schoolmates were full of glee at their dunking games. Only casually did a girl pull me erect, stand me upright in the treacherous water. She had no idea I was drowning. I had managed to drown secretly, without the terrible cusp of rescue, its required acknowledgment. I stood in that cold lake water and shuddered with the force of my dreadful escape.

Perhaps then began my interminable journey. I became adept at pretending that nothing had happened, that I had not been caught in the arms of a persistent and relentless death. Denial became my mantra.

Although my dear one tries to beak my silence into pieces, tries to make my thighs whisper, my palms shout, I still pretend that nothing has happened, that I am not chattered, grieving for breath in lungs filled with water. I keep silent the fragility of my body in the face of ruthless interruption.

There are assassins everywhere.”

“If you travel enough, you eventually lose the clauses of well-constructed sentences. The faming of questions in languages that are not yours takes on the color of fragment, always fragment, broken thought.”

“I argue with my dear one. ‘What matters,’ I say to him, ‘are private hopes, dreams without guilt, duty defection.’

‘Bullshit,’ he says, stoking the back of my neck. ‘What matters are carrots, venetian blinds, toboggans, a glass of cold water.’

He’s like that, my dear one.”

“Staring at the blurred rectangle of the window, I lay awake, my chest clenching and aching. It is a strange feeling to lie in an impersonal hotel trying to control your weeping, trying to keep yourself from shouting with sobs, fearful that the body beside you will wake and demand explanations. Crying is an act that the world expects us to keep secret, behind closed curtains and locked doors, as if it were an indulgence.”

“I wanted to die.

My wanting to die was part of a conversation that I never had with that particular assassin or with any of the assassins that followed him. None of them asked, not one noticed or registered any passion beyond the usual ampersand of bodies, as if genital conjunction should be enough to still all tears. Unprofessional assassins want to believe that decisions of desire are accidental, unplanned, not their responsibility. They believe a woman makes herself available because she’s there. Unprofessional assassins believe that women need them, and they are remarkably oblivious to what our bodies crave.”

“He did not want to hear my crying. He did not want to know why I wanted to die. He slept and I lay awake, watching the wash of city lights swirl over the walls, hearing the late night grind of the one o’clock freight on the tracks behind the hotel. Imagining the rest of my life in a disentanglement of utilitarian limbs, the word love to be avoided at all costs, the body recalcitrant in its longing, bone-lonely for a hand to stroke my head until my eyes closed in sleep.

I wanted to die, and not one of those assassins ever noticed. Although, of course, they all wanted to kill me.”

“Traveling is a conversation with elusive minutes, time zones destroying simultaneous life.”

“The panoply of time zones, those invisible lines that make the sun follow its sphere, insist on separation, inscribe loss.”

“Here is the burden on my argument with life.

I have forgotten homesickness.”

“Unable to apprehend myself, I admit to my evasions, my continuing journeys, as acts of self-trickery. I have always believed that I will apprehend myself elsewhere, for at home I am evasive as a veil.”

“Traveling convinces me that I will be lucky enough to stumble over my own feet as I round a corner, as I elbow my way through a crowded bar to order gin and tonic with ice and lemon.

The woman standing there, face tilted slightly away, hair shading her eyes, will be me, finally apprehended, and willing to be found. Eager to recognize herself. At last.”

“What is the source of restlessness? A guilty heart. Trembling legs. An impatience with toast crumbs and flossing. A glass of water drunk too quickly. A terrible conscience. The second hand on the kitchen clock. Not the first gray hair but the third. Shoes that are too big. Longing. Shoes that are too small. Staying home.”

“These are the rules. If there is anything about him that I find repulsive, I can terminate the process. I will still have to pay the kill fee, but in such circumstances, the notion of going forward merely in order to save money is crazy.

He tells me, as he is required to, that I can change my mind right up until he commits the act and finishes what I have initiated.

I nod, and he too eases down on the edge of the bed, not close to me, but close to my posture, the two of us caught in uncomfortable pause.”

“Between departure and arrival I am desolate, inconsolable.”

“Here, now, waiting to arrive at the moment of ultimate arrival, ultimate departure, I want to weep into my hands, homesick for my own terrible restlessness and its demise, its closed confusion.”

“Places aren’t foreign if we’re a part of them.”

“I am truly beside myself now, cannot seem to merge with whomever that self is named, if she is different from who she once was or wanted to be.”

“What is troubling about hotels is that life can be reduced to a bed, a lamp, a table, a closet, a sink, the gestures of the body reduced to the acts of maintenance.”

“Bells seem to speak a language that I have missed, and they are all calling to me, ‘Stranger, go home.’”

“ ‘Are you supposed to try and make me change my mind?’

‘I am supposed to give you every possible opportunity to decide. Finally.’

‘And when I say, you will proceed.’

‘Yes. But we do have all night. Neither one of us needs to be somewhere else. The room is paid for. We don’t have a deadline.’”

“But I do. I’ve been traveling for years. I want to arrive.

Every person wishes for a subtle assassin, the natural magic of a perfectly arranged end. And doesn’t it make sense that people want to determine their final moments – at the same time denying death, avoiding it even when crumbling bodies yearn for sleep?

Why should death be arbitrary, unplanned?”

“ ‘What right have I to be miserable?” I ask. ‘Such terrible hope.’”

“My prolonged and pathological restlessness terrifies me.”

“ ‘Are you miserable then?’

‘Why else would a person choose to die? Why else arrange a death?’

‘Some people want to die at the zenith of their lives. They imagine they can never be happier, they want to stop at that peak.’

I have to turn and look at him, but he’s serious.

‘They’re wise,’ I say. ‘Most people believe that happiness is foolish enough to continue, even grow.’

‘And you?’

‘Let’s just say that I am not intensely miserable, and not intensely happy.’

‘Not intensely anything?’

‘No.’

‘So you want a conclusion. No hope for a change in pitch?’

‘No. No intensity in sight. And I do not intend to look forward to tolerable dawns.’”

“ ‘But I can’t make that my focus. She’s an old lady, she’ll last until she’d ninety-nine, she’ll drive until they take her license away, she’ll go to yoga twice a week, she’ll make a story out of me, she’s a survivor.’

‘And you’re not.’

‘I don’t want to be.’”

“I have no endurance. I have been defeated by details.”

“A meal, a walk. Where’s the harm? He has signed a contract, made a promise. He won’t stop me. I won’t stop him.”

“ ‘Once you give me the signal to proceed,’ he says, ‘nothing you say or do will stop me.’”

“Those who keep their eyes squeezed tightly shut don’t have to take account of what their hands do.”

“He makes every touch a story, every story a touch, every touch a reassurance. I did not know how lonely I was until he convinced me to lower my porcupine quills, open my fists. Let go.”

“Kindness is underrated, it should head the characteristics that women seeking lovers advertise for.”

“I think of prayer, that I ought to unload my soul and, despite my agnostic heart, make some confession. After all, this is the night of my death. I will be crossing the barrier of human repentance. And cannot imagine what I should confess. Unhappiness? Plenty of that, yes. Desperation? Not really. Unkindness? Oddly, through all my uneven years, I think I was specifically unkind only when I refused to return to Holland with my parents. I haven’t inflicted myself on others. My greatest unkindness has been my refusal to connect, the safe distance that I wager from the world. What other sins? Greed? My possessions could hardly measure up to acquisitiveness. Sloth? Yes, some laziness, this act I intend to carry out is possibly born of laziness more than despair. I’m tired, I’d like to sleep.

Any other sins? Restlessness. A given. My restless heart, my restless travels, my restless bed, my restless contact lenses, my restless fingernail polish, me restless boots, my restless coffee grinder. Buses, taxis, airports, suitcase straps, lost earrings, forgotten raincoats, cheesy movies, smudged mirrors. Restless everything. Restless restlessness.”

“ ‘Is Calgary completely introspective?’

‘Oh no, the opposite. It looks everywhere and fails to notice that its own shoelace is untied.’”

“ ‘Let me tell you, I am only one of many many women who wake in the middle of the night going over the tenuous knowledge they’ve uncovered, who count all the promises they’ve been made and who know there is nothing to be done with that wisdom, nothing at all.’

‘Do you believe that?’

‘I believe it. I know it. Even better, I accept that fact. Most women learn it and then spend the rest of their lives trying to forget or ignore what they’ve learned. They get what they settle for, which makes their lives dreadful, imprisoned by pantyhose and casseroles and daycare and Valium. I refuse to settle for what I’ve been dealt. It’s not enough.’

He has caught my clenched fists in his gloved hands. Holding me there, he bends his head above mine for a moment, almost as if in prayer, then releases me and turns to walk again. Without a word. He will not stop me.”

“ ‘I would rather be sorry than safe. But that’s not so bad. “When I am dead, me dearest, Sing no sad songs for me…”’

He spins around. ‘Is that it? You want to be remembered?’

I throw my arms wide, gesture at the sky. ‘I want to be forgotten.’

‘But you’re fearful that you won’t be.’

Perhaps I am afraid that no one will speak of me at all. Me dear one. He would not help me. He promised that if I left, he would erase me.”

“I do not tell Derrick Atman how I fight persistent homesickness.

How the smell in other people’s houses makes me catch my breath, how the splutter of frying hangs in a kitchen, the blue tang of mineral salts stirs a bathroom. Time emanates waiting, and history has a smell, powerfully musty, mute with long division.

But it all proceeds at a distance from me, the homeless one.”

“ ‘And what do you answer yourself?’

‘I want to stay home.’ I though traveling would give me a perspective, a point of view, a character. Such a long and zigzagged search, and I managed to fail. I say this to my killer.

‘I failed.’

‘Failed?’

‘I looked for a person I could be. I searched for – ha, how Canadian of me – an identity.’”

“ ‘There,’ I point it out to Derrick Atman. ‘A self-conscious building.’

He stops, leans his head back. If I were a sculptor I would create a statue in exactly that pose, an eloquent-bodied man in a proper overcoat leaning back, hands in his pockets, to observe the sweep of a skyscraper. A perfect gesture for Calgary, where the businessmen look straight ahead or at their feet, despite the glass mirrors flashing semaphore around them.

‘Why self-conscious?’

‘Well, like a woman looking into a compact, the building can’t escape its own reflection.’

‘Okay, it’s immodest, but still, there’s an element of shyness there.’

‘You’re a kind critic.’

‘It’s your favorite building.’

‘It is,’ I admit. ‘It wears its own admission of defeat. During the day the glass is browny-pink, the shadow building almost sinister in its wrap-around hold on the bottom.’

‘Like the interior of a mind.’

‘Yes, buildings, like people, have character. That one reminds me of myself. Wearing its own projection.’

‘That’s your choice.’

‘Maybe I have no choice.’”

“Here on the street, I can feel the unutterable answer my indiscreet heart seeks.

Language makes us restless. If I could rest in language, I might be less impatient, I might be able to mime contentment.

I should be content, willing to inhabit the silent space I share with my dear one. My dear one. We avoided saying the obvious. It’s snowing. I’m tired. When are you done work? Can you pick up a loaf of bread? Now I think we should have used that language, used it to touch each other. Instead, we relied on physical touch, that short-lived eloquence.

And I’m shy, inarticulate, my misery dumb in its miming, and the only request I could make, one that he said no to.”

“He does it again, that gesture of turning his palms out, as if to show me that they contain no sinister secret.”

“I cannot help myself, reach across and touch with my fingertips, an uncertain tenderness, the wounded hand that has promised to release me.”

“Genetics is a cave, a hollowed out spoon within the earth that holds the potential for hurt.

‘Do you think people inherit sadness?’ I ask.

‘They say that depression is passed on. But does the origin or cause matter? Isn’t how people cope with what they carry more important?

‘ “Palm trees don’t grow on ice.” A quote I’ve never forgotten, Umberto Veruda, I think. That might be an epitaph for the genetics of sadness.’

‘But doesn’t ice have its own life? Its own beauty? Its own crystalline growth?’

‘Only if you are an aficionado of cold, and I am not quite capable of imagining green fronds where there is only hoarfrost.’

‘But hoarfrost is beautiful!’

‘To optimists and over-romantic poets.’”

“ ‘Have you - ?’ His flesh seems to hesitate, pull inward, then straighten with courage.”

“ ‘Do you think some chemical concoction can erase grief? And should I want it to? Why not be sad, why not be willing to quit the world? Too many people hang on when they should give up. They are convinced that they ought to be satisfied with the occasional spicy taco, a box of truffles on special occasions, holding the channel changer in one hand, driving the minivan ten kilometres the speed limit. What an empty set of motivations, a mockery. Most people haven’t the imagination to get themselves murdered.’

‘But ordinary things are comforting. People make do.’

‘Why? Why should they? And even if they will, why should I? Making do is not enough.’”

“And I spent most of last night writing my dear one a letter, a letter I know is woefully limited, filled with my terrible silence, my cowardly decampment.”

“ ‘She’s waiting for something that matters,’ I murmur.

‘We’re all doing that.’”

“ ‘Okay, I admit as much,’ I say. ‘I’ve been using distance to meddle with the plot of my life, to alter my course, to escape, plunge headlong into a denial that I have always known I should confront. There, I’ve confessed.’

‘What have you been denying?’ Derrick Atman asks.

‘My own disaffection, my inability to deal with mundane cruelties. I want to destroy day-to-day abrasions of life’s obvious plot. I can no longer swallow guidebook advice. Here is your street, here is your work, here are the people you must nod and smile at, whose only goal is to make others trip and fall, whose only desire is to set the innocent on fire.’

‘No one disregards cruelty or poison.’

‘Oh, but we do. We cancel our disgust, contain our pain, or we die. And so I’ve been trying to erase my sensitivities through insistent movement, leaving I’m Away, Do Not Disturb, hanging on my doorknob, my friends having to be patient as those old-time photos, where the clothes pretend you are historical.’

‘He looks quizzical. ‘So you’re running away.’

‘No, that’s too simple. I’m using travel to erase everything else, to escape the unbearable, to believe myself invisible.’

‘You want to be invisible?’

‘Of course, even if it’s impossible. Every country I travel to proves me visible – my clothes are wrong, my accent is wrong, the very cut of my hair is asymmetrical, out of culture. Even if I never open my mouth, my shoulders and wrists betray me, and the flash in a stranger’s eyes that says foreigner, vreemde is worst of all. So I try countries where I’m really visible, my skin whey compared to everyone else. I juggle my visibility even though I want to blend into the wallpaper as if I were the hidden wall underneath.’

‘Like that building, visible and invisible playing together, reflecting a reflection that isn’t there.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Like contact lenses?’

‘No, more like shoes. North Americans will always wear runners or gym shoes, declare their allegiance to Nike or Brooks without blushing. Europeans wear discreet leather walking shoes that can pass for dress shoes. The rest of the world wears what is comfortable or what they are used to or what they damn well please. You see, the ability of feet to change, say, into a pair of high-heeled pumps for an evening at the opera, that’s a signal. Feet demand familiar shoes, rubbed straps and shoelaces that have settled into their eyelets. You see? You see?’

‘I don’t. But it’s a good confession.’”

“The picaresque tradition historically argues for travel as a self-conscious activity, metadestinational wickedly aware that it seeks its own extinction. Picaresque travelers long to behave badly, and while they see themselves as unmaskers of a hypocritical world, they also know themselves to be cowards with a failed cause, able only to pursue their own pursuit. So I work to stay ambiguous, watching myself following myself and rejoicing in the small indiscretions I manage to commit.”

“So, I travel for my work, but I know I’m an outsider, a failed participant, repentant rouge, mere tourist.”

“But you know the lie of your experience. You’ve diagnosed it yourself.”

“ ‘Do you think,’ and my voice sounds hollow, ‘people should be stamped by experience, say a physical mark, like being pierced by an arrow, so that a person carried visible evidence showing that they’d actually visited – and been scarred by – a particular place?’”

“Arranged accidents are no longer accidental. And death is an inescapable registry.”

“ ‘Right now I’d say that some arrangement has been accidentally disarranged. She seems awfully impatient, as if she’s been waiting too long at someone else’s mercy and can’t do what she wants.’

‘But she seems completely at home there.’

‘In a strange place, we turn to what is familiar, don’t we?’”

“I think the photographer has to take pleasure in the person or the landscape that she wants to capture. But when I take pleasure in a place, I don’t want to interrupt by stopping to take a picture. And if I’m not experiencing pleasure, why bother with a camera?”

“I thought I could become a version of notebook, blank pages loose and ruffled, a bill here, a leaflet, a scarp of ticket with the single word wait scrawled on its back. Of course, I deceive myself by even believing I am worthy of notice.”

“Is her impatience for herself or someone else?”

“ ‘…Now you’ll have to stop watching.’

‘No, now I have to watch the door to see if I can catch her coming out of the hotel!’

He throws back his head and laughs. ‘You are entirely too curious to be ready to die.’

‘No, I’m not. Just because I watch her for a while doesn’t mean that I intend to keep on watching.’”

“ ‘So you don’t dare to stay home.’

‘It’s perverse, isn’t it? If I stayed home, I’d be a better person. Instead, I’m always fluttering off. And then I’m homesick.’”

“Except that I wanted him to kill me. And unlike all the other assassins, he refused.”

“ ‘It’s just good to see her, to see her walking. She knows what she wants.’

‘Apparently,’ he says, ‘so do you.’”

“Travelling, I became an antitravel ghost, an aubergine bruised without falling, a thin curtain sweeping aside rain. I was full of travel’s ambiguous desires, but I was always unfulfilled, always frustrated.

The better to know I was not at home.”

“In Trieste I began to understand that words can slice a heart to ribbons. The cold Ariatic lapped against my hazy inarticulate pain.”

Jann Arden: Happy?

“When the wind blows the leaves away from the trees, I sit by my window and weep. There is no such thing as the sadness of angels. My dear one loves me too much. He refused to kill me.”

“ ‘Oh yes,’ I say to Derrick Atman, ‘of course cities have personalities. They’re like people we live with, try to understand, fight, hold in our arms. People we miss desperately and then take for granted.’”

“And everything that’s been pulled down or buried has as much weight as what’s left, present and alive. You can hardly breathe for the scent of death, the wonderful groan of continual mourning.”

Canova’s Theseus Slaying the Centaur

“His left hand holds his bandaged right, his chin resting on both, and he watches me with – I hardly dare interpret his expression – absolute delight. I’ve seduced him. He’s taking pleasure in my obsessions.”

Orson Welles’ The Third Man

“I stop and he says nothing. I can hear him listening.”

“ ‘Assassin.’ His face changes instantly, and he looks angry, genuinely angry.”

“ ‘Have you not known love, found love? Is there no one who will miss you, who will cry for you when you are no longer a voice or a body?’

I swallow hard, and now I am the one who is angry, a wash of clear adrenaline flooding up to my ears. ‘You mean, would I be asking for you to commit this injury against me if I were happily “in love” now? Love has nothing to do with my decision, although love isn’t easy to give up. It lodges where it will, like any trickster. Every time I thought I had found love, I found another assassin – sorry, killer.’

‘I know I’m not the first. By the time I’m called, people have usually tried several amateurs.’

‘Exactly. But even loved, why persist in thinking that love will prove a reason to continue? What if I am well loved, loved with attention and delight? Does that inoculate me against despair? Does love provide a home or erase restlessness?’

‘It helps.’

‘Not at all. Love makes the terror worse, the desire to die more intense. Because it can persuade a person to accept the plunge of life, to tolerate the worst indignities.’”

“ ‘…I remember standing alongside my schoolmates feeling as if we did not come from the same world. I wanted to be alone, I wanted to linger and loiter and measure the size of the light and the misty rain alone. I imagine I still fancied that I could have an impact on my own life. I must have believed that when I actually touched the hand of someone who could guess my inarticulate dreams, that touch would be electric, uncompromised, full of meaning.’

‘So you were ready to fall in love.’

‘I watched and wandered and sniffed at the dirty Seine, thinking my patience would reward me. I wanted to be surprised, seduced by an outrageous recognition. I was waiting for a touch beyond touch, a breath to inflame me. All I learned was that Paris was the wrong stage for discovery, too mythologized, too adamantly romantic. Paris was full of pilgrims, itinerants like the students I was with, lurking on its fringes. If I wanted to be part of a collage, I could tear myself to pieces, but I wanted to be whole when love reached for me, I wanted to have faith in my surrender. I imagined smothering my conscience in hot steam, but I could not imagine myself as painter’s model or sad inspiration. Maybe I just missed the prairies.’

‘You were disappointed.’”

“I have to laugh at him, the serious look on his face when he asks that question.”

“I went out, restless, thirsty, and in the dusty heart of that imaginary town, I searched for the despair that I assumed I had merely mislaid.”

“ ‘…Anyway, this clown carried her antics into the audience, bridged the invisible zone between stage and seats, teasing, seating people in the wrong places, messing up well-combed hair. She made people clutch themselves with laughter, but she also terrified them. Wouldn’t you be afraid if you expected to be entertained, if you expected to be able to remain safely at a distance from the smell of circus grease, and then found a pig-tailed tramp pulling off your tie?’

‘I might be relieved.’

‘Not most people. They were afraid of her. They hoped she would leave them alone, even while they rolled in their seats at other people’s discomfort.’

‘Yes, we don’t want to be the cause of laughter.’

‘But I wanted her to touch me with her quick transformations. I wanted her to come to me.’

‘And?’

‘She would not. She scanned the audience, she looked at me, she saw me, she looked directly into my eyes, and she averted hers. She moved to the other side of the aisle, she played her monkey trick on a blonde in a leather skirt.’

‘You think that was deliberate?’

‘Oh yes, it was. She shunned me.’

‘Because you were sad?’

‘Because I was a lost cause, a dead soul.’

‘How could she see that?’

‘I don’t know. She looked at me, and a wince of rejection crossed her face.’”

“She made it clear that I had no future, that joy and make-believe are beyond what I can accomplish.”

“ ‘So you had no wish to die there.’

‘I hadn’t yet confronted my desire to die.’”

“His breathing came in ragged gasps, but he composed himself, almost as if he were smoothing down his soutane, and then he touched his hand to my head, gently this time, and ran it down the blanket covering the length of my body, along my shoulder, my arm, my belly, my thighs, until he reached my feet, their bump at the end of the bed. As if he were blessing me. Then he turned and slid out of the room as soundlessly as he had entered.”

“ ‘Do you blame men then, for your restlessness?’

‘No, no. They would like to be blamed, but most of the men I’ve known have been incidental killers.’

‘Harmless.’

‘Oh, harmful enough, but unable to translate their desire for power over life and death into anything much beyond rage. Violent rage, but rarely accurate or effective.’

‘Ah,’ he says, nodding. ‘I understand. Killers but not killers; hatred but not responsibility.’”

“That was when I began to think I was capable of being an irredentist for death. […] An irredentist is someone who lives under the suasion and possession of a foreign power, someone who wants to rejoin the state that she deals herself linked to in terms of history and culture.”

“She’ll know immediately what I’ve done, and what’s more, I believe she’ll understand, even be glad of that final drink, that unconsummated good-bye.”

“Is this the last space I will cross, will my footsteps be burned in some way into this marble floor?”

“So it seems fitting that I should return to this hotel, to a room where I know I will be saved by assassination rather than from it.”

“ ‘I’ve been watching you,’ she says.

Is this a confession, an accusation? A trick?”

“No, you have a restless light around you, sometimes green, sometimes indigo. I could see your anxiety the moment I looked out of my window across to yours. You’re about to undertake something you fear, you’re about to jump.”

“ ‘Thanks for your concern.’ I move to walk around her to the door, but she catches my arm roughly, holds me there. I don’t try to pull away but stand, docile, waiting.

‘There’s no sin to restlessness,’ she says. ‘We all have it. We learn to live with it.’

And without letting go of my arm, she pulls me closer and kisses me full on the mouth, her lips as soft as the leaves of a clover, her breath smelling of mint, her skin against mine impossibly smooth.

I kiss her back.”

“I was on the verge of tears, not from my bloodied knees but their kindness, the touch of their work-worn hands on my arms. Their string handbags bounced over their wrists, but even busy with market-day provisioning, they took time to be shocked at my fall, knowing that they too could crumple to the ground without notice.

That was when I understood. My dear one can pick me up, but I will always fall again.”

“ ‘I’m just letting you know that asking for a gentle killer is a contradiction in terms.’

‘An oxymoron?’

‘Exactly. A killer cannot be expected to be outstandingly gentle or he would choose another profession.’

‘But you seem gentle, trustworthy.’ I’m puzzled. What is he trying to tell me?

He nods. ‘I do my best. But I have my professional side.’”

“There are, the despairing know, two dimensions and two palettes, time and space, both dynamic, but frequently invisible to each other, mysterious energies that take no account of human interference, ignoring inquisitive and acquisitive gestures. And so we who despair travel to the world we expect to find, and taking our time with us – the interminable wristwatch, the ubiquitous travel alarm – find exactly what we expect. Or find instead white nights, the sun rotating a landscape of its own, chronometric challenges insisting again that the traveler is out of time and tune, lost to hours and seconds, hoist on a minute hand, time something that we wish to forget and cannot, its tyranny keeping us ruddered to the apron strings of gravity.”

“All a person wants is the private act of a key, the commonplace of new soap next to thickly folded towels. We all – tourists, conference delegates, government officials, business travelers, job seekers, awkward friends, long-lost brothers, rock stars, married people having affairs and not least, potential suicides – want the same thing. A neutral space.”

“I’m adding these details up, running though the tally as if to keep this woman’s eyes from seeing too much of what I want.”

“I can be any of those. I do as I please.”

“She must have stumbled on a reference book for incipient travelers, those who cherish irrepressible movement, as if destination were Ariadne’s thread, as if destination were possible.”

“His dislike for the woman is visible, transparent as wind.”

“Derrick Atman wants to test her. I can see that she strains his patience, and he has been until now a very patient man.”

“The woman and my kindly killer are battling over something, but I cannot imagine what or why. They do not know one another, they are strangers.

And I am so tired, so tired.”

Anne Tyler’s Accidental Tourist

“ ‘Goodnight,’ Derrick Atman will call after her. And is it my imagination, or will there be a seam of finality in his voice?”

“My carefully chosen assassin will unlock the door to our room, and we’ll step inside with as much slow courtesy as if we have not been around the world together.”

“He’ll hesitate, narrow his eyes, then shrug and pass the note, which I’ll unfold, my fingers slow and clumsy.

When he reads this, he’ll kill you. Be careful.

I’ll shake my head. Of course. That’s what I want him to do. Why does she think she needs to warn me?

I’ll hold that paper between my fingers, and yes, I’ll read the echo of my earlier note, the letter I mailed my dear one. When you read this, you’ll kill me. Be careful not to hate me, please.”

“They suggest that I will be able to find myself, to discover a destination. So far they have not helped at all. But here I am.”

“ He will be rambling on, talking as if to himself. ‘No, this hotel is experienced. It is possible to die here because death has happened here before.’

I’ll hear that and sing out, ‘And your goal is to ensure that.’

‘Exactly. I am required to do what you tell me to do.’”

“And without turning, I will feel him standing behind me. He will move silently as vapor, watching her too, but sharply.”

“Smelling their lingering breath, I wanted to faint into the stained and still-warm bed sheets, the rucked covers taunting my aloneness, my very appointment with homesickness.”

“Travelling has become my version of self-punishment.

I ache with grief, I relieve my angry losses. I travel to avoid forgiving myself. To avoid my dear one, who would love me back to life.

My dear one. I asked him to kill me, but he refused.

My dear one, whom I leave. But gently.”

“Through my feet tingle the slow thickening of the desire my dear one has gifted me, a languid spill that could resemble the climb of light at dawn, the parting of a soft mouth, the wide-flung turn of a knee.

There is no similarity between sex and death.”

“Why is every killer convinced that his or her method is original, a complete invention, treading a path where no sneaker has ever gone, a route undiscovered? Of course, the paths of lovers and killers are remarkably alike, a track migrated into the ground, bearing the weight of many feet, a veritable ant trail complete with markings and their cynicisms.

Where will the ambiguous desires of love and travel mesh? Can either be stopped or started? When is travel a pleasure, and when is it torture? Can movement peel open the parable of a layered blood orange? Love is travel’s loss, a jolt of maplessness, the iconic jest of experience made hollow. Not even the echo of an Alhambra can fill that space.”

“I will lie entranced on that bed and refuse to think of answers or questions. I will thumb my next plane ticket, imagine a tram that can carry me back to the nineteenth century, invent an itinerary impossible to follow, pack a suitcase full of maps of disappeared places.

My worst destinations were assassins hungry for departure, whispering a secret mantra to detour any trip resembling love.

Go away.”

“He’ll make me forget the unreadable compilation of living, how events and gestures interlock from necessity and habit, every behavior caused by particular sources.

Is there a pattern then? Is it possible to hold life’s years up to the light and see a kaleidoscope pattern? Can a physician extract humiliation from a heart and use it as balm to soothe the very heart so injured?

What is the material of a life? Birth leading to death, those mere parentheses?

I will remain a runaway, a hideout, believing that what has hurt me most can cure me. If my life has been choked by would-be assassins, then it will be time for me to choose my own assassin. And he’ll do well. I’m not his first.

He’ll try to deter me by making me tell him stories about my travels, my itinerant impressions of the world, how, desperate for danger, I roamed the rump neighborhoods of cities, how I was smiled at but left untouched, unmolested, when I longed to be robbed, when I was eager to come upon myself sprawled in the gutter.

Too many potential assassins saw me, eyed me and smiled, but my face warned them away.”

“Is death a happy ending?”

Also author of Judith, The Tent Peg, No Fixed Address: An Amorous Journey, and Places Far From Elsewhere.