] 13 [

Saturday, November 20, 3 a.m.

He continued driving through the night after resting at the roadside. His hunger pangs had turned into cramps, and every couple of hours, in the static dark through the countryside of central New Brunswick, he’d pull over and squat in the brush to push out a hot stream of shit into the dirt. It stank of bile. His body was starting to eat itself.

He drove the highway crouched over the steering wheel, his stomach tortioning inside his gut. He could smell his breath bouncing off the inside of the windshield: a combination of wet dog and tooth rot. An undertone of acid. He was very sick, he knew this now. He knew it could become an obstacle.

The headlights pushed along the road surface, the cracks in the old asphalt rolling toward him, an ever-changing, wild line moving like an endless branch under the car. He fought his exhaustion and reached inside his mind to find his brother, and he spoke to him. Be with me now, my brother. Sit with me and look at this night with me, this beautiful, empty night. He saw his brother lying racked in his bed. The flower of his beloved body, sudden in death’s preawakening, ready to seed. We are drawing the spore of your soul from one ocean to another, like a lace cinching us together.

He pulled his head up suddenly and saw the road again, forced the car hard back onto the flattop, his breath as thin as the buzzing of a fly. He saw the pale, blinking light of the gas station that marked the halfway point of this road that slid through the dark between the two main highways. There lay the promise of a few empty calories, perhaps a toilet with a light, but he blew past it, pushing his foot down on the accelerator. He would be in Pictou by mid-morning as he’d promised. He’d emailed Tamara Laurence from a library in Quesnel to say he would arrive on November 20 at one o’clock in the afternoon, and he had been late only once in his travels, and early just once. He tried to keep his appointments to the minute. He had even waited in his car on the streets of Port Dundas for half an hour the afternoon he’d arrived to take Delia in order to be at her door precisely at three. He could not ask for the trust it entailed to join him in this profound chain if his first gesture was to break his word.

His stomach folded over on itself and he had to stop again. He stumbled out of the car and hurriedly pulled his black pants down around his ankles and shat into the gravel, heard the explosion of pebbles underneath him. He cleaned himself, and in the rising steam he smelled meat and he carried the soiled tissue around to the front of the car and held it up in front of his headlights. It was drenched with blood. He drove through the rest of the dark in a stew of dreams and agony, but when he saw the ocean at eleven o’clock in the morning, his stomach settled like a storm lifting and he was able to sit up straighter behind the wheel. There was the compulsion to take any one of the little dirt roads that led north to the shoreline now, but by the map he saw that he would arrive at Pictou with only minutes to spare and he kept his eyes forward. Back in Amherst, a tang of salt had suddenly manifested in the air, an Atlantic salt, though, lighter and more acrid than the smell of the ocean from back home. Still, it woke him, thrilled him to the root. From a well he knew he could draw on when he had to, strength returned to his muscles. The sunlight processing through the windshield went into him like sugar.

He followed the curving road through the shore towns, their houses stacked up on the hillsides like loose teeth. Finally, he saw the signs for Pictou and went through the town to the other side, just where the forest began again. He passed a golf course and went right, bearing down toward the harbour. A huge plume of white smoke hung over the trees from the paper plant across the water, puffing out its scrubbed toxins over the inlet. Sulphur and salt in the air. He saw Tamara’s house as she’d described it in her message to him and he pulled over.

 

A hard surface, a sensation of rope. Gullivered. His eyes would not open. There was an irregular surface beneath him. Wood or straw. He pushed his eyelids together to moisten them and then forced them open and he was looking up at a stucco ceiling inlaid with rough planks. The air was cold on his face. Someone had tucked a heavy blanket around his body and the weight of it was somehow immobilizing him. His mouth was crusted, and he lifted his hand to wipe his lips and heard the dull clack of a tangle of tubing that, to his great surprise, he had pulled up with his arm. He was attached to something; he turned his head slightly upward and saw a metal stand behind him. Two bags, one with a clear liquid, the other containing blood. A transfusion. Someone was saving his life, a great transgression: the blood of strangers. He managed to lift his shoulders and he craned his neck forward to see it was not the blankets that were holding him in place, but cloth straps over his shins and his pelvis. They were ratcheted tight by means of belt clasps cinched against the surface of the bed.

This was not a hospital, however. A house. He was in a basement. The lights were dimmed, but through a doorway halfway down the wall on his right, he saw a quiet yellow glow. He called out and something blocked the light momentarily and the door opened. A woman stood in it with a burning cigarette in one hand and his gun in the other. The room was warm, but she was wearing a sweater and a thick burgundy shawl lay over her shoulders. She was as thin as a crack in a wall. “You’re a dangerous man, aren’t you, Simon?” she said.

“Where am I?”

“You drive up right on time. I watch you from the window, you go to the back of your car, open the hatch, and drop like someone’s cut the legs out from under you. Half-dead behind your own car. You were hunched over a leather kitbag full of neat things.” She held the gun up. “This for one. Although I found the hatchet and the hammer interesting backup. I guess hatchets don’t jam.”

She came farther into the room and sat at the foot of the bed. She moved with great difficulty and when she sat, her knees and hips crackled. “You’re Tamara,” he said.

“You’d better call me Dr. Laurence for now. I could get into a lot of trouble for doing what I’m doing. But I’m already in a lot of trouble, so what the hell. Death removes your hospital privileges anyway, doesn’t it?”

“Why am I restrained?”

She tugged on one of the straps. It barely moved. “Who knows what you might do to me if you weren’t restrained, Simon.”

“You’re frightened of me?”

“I wasn’t until I found your medicine bag. Then I started to wonder what I’d signed up for.”

He struggled against the ties until he was almost sitting up. He felt a tugging under the covers in his groin. “You shouldn’t be smoking, Tamara.”

She laughed in disbelief. “I know. It’s bad for me. Look, I want to know what you were planning to do once you got here.”

“I was going to kill you. You know that. That’s why you invited me here.”

She shifted on the bed to face him. Her eyes were set back in her head and the smoke drove them farther away from him, as if she were wearing a veil. He was finding the farther east he went, the closer his supplicants were to the edge. He was arriving in the nick of time. “I signed up for mercy. Or at least I thought I did. What is all that shit in your bag?”

“Medicine.”

“Since when did the healing arts include hand-to-hand combat?” She coughed heavily.

“Release me, Tamara.”

“I thought that was your job.”

“Tamara.”

“You’re not wearing any pants,” she said. “You’ve got a tube up your prick. A catheter. Didn’t want you wetting my rattan.”

He lay back down to take the strain out of his lower back, looked at the tubes in his arm again. The one in his hand delivered the clear liquid. The blood was flowing into a port on the inside of his arm. “I gather you’re having second thoughts,” he said.

He heard her get up and leave the room, then re-enter. She put his medicine bag down on the floor beside him and opened it. “Take me through this,” she said, removing a couple of glass vials from within. “Foxglove?”

“I’ve done nothing to deserve being held prisoner.”

“This is like, herbal digitalis, right?”

“It’s for my heart.”

“Or someone else’s. This stuff can stop you like a clock.” She tossed it back into the bag with a clink and took out a vial of powder. “What’s this?”

He strained over his shoulder to look at it. “It’s a fungus.”

“Shrooms, huh? What’s it do?”

“It sedates.”

“How much of this to kill a person?”

“Not a lot. Look…”

“No, you look, you fucking sicko.” She stood up with his kit and tossed it into the corner of the room. He heard something inside the bag shatter. “I thought you were some kind of shaman. But obviously you’re a right fucking lunatic and I don’t know how many people have fallen for your–”

“TAMARA.” His voice filled the room and covered her up. She fell silent. “If you’d like to stand there speculating on the evil I represent, then go right ahead. But given that I can’t pose much of a threat in the position I’m in, perhaps you’d be willing to let me address your issues.”

“Address my issues? I’m a bag of cancer, Simon. A tumour with a face on it. What’s to address?”

“You can’t go about killing people even if you have their permission,” he said. “It’s a crime. And given that I’m committing crimes, I think it best to at least hide my purpose. I deliver a painless death in the name of something quite profound, Tamara, and then, if I think it advisable, I cover it up another way. I leave no trail but the one I am laying down and the one that you’ve asked to follow.”

She laughed now. “Do you give this speech to all your victims?”

“None of them seem to require it. But you, in witnessing my weakness now believe me to be capable of a great insult. You invited me here, Tamara. To be a part of something. What is it to you that my methods seem strange? Either you want to join us, or you don’t. Whichever, you’ll still die. I only offer an alternative.”

“An alternative to death.”

“An alternative meaning.”

She was silent a moment. He remained on his back, looking upward. He had the desire to pull the tubes out of his arm, but he wanted to bring her back. He had no one else in this area to call on: it was Tamara followed by Carl Smotes in Trinity Bay and then he was done. She said, “So just let me get this straight. You’ve been showing up at people’s homes, gently euthanizing them, and then, let’s see, committing unspeakable desecrations to their dead bodies. Is that right?”

“Sometimes,” he said. “I would be breaking my word to all of you if I got caught. Would that not be worse?”

She thought about it. He was aware that she was shuttling from anger and disbelief back toward where he had met her. She was almost with him again. “So what were you going to do to me?”

He raised himself back on his elbows so he could look at her. She was sitting in a chair on the other side of the room, her shawl pulled tight across her chest now. “I would have made you some tea. Something to settle you. Then I would have examined you to ensure your physical body was complete–”

“Complete.”

“Yes. As I said in my messages to you, only those who are whole in body can be a part of this. Whole as God made you.”

“I’ve had about fifteen pounds of tumour removed from my body.”

“I’m more concerned with surgeries of vanity, Tamara. Stomach tucks, breast enlargements. I want a body as God intended it to be. I make room for some things: tonsils…tumours.”

“What about a new heart valve?”

His own heart sank. “Have you had a valve replaced, Tamara?”

“No. I’m just asking.”

“It would probably be too much. Is there something you want me to know?”

She shifted in the chair. It seemed to creak as much as her body did. “After the tea, then what?”

“I’d make a tincture of some kind. It’s always different. An opiate in your case, to help you deal with your pain, followed by something to stop your heart.”

“And then what.”

He stared at her, willing her to tell him she didn’t need to know, but she calmly returned his gaze. “In your case, Tamara, I was going to remove your arms and legs.”

She blinked at him a couple of times and then broke into a broad, if nervous, grin. “Really? How were you going to do that?”

“I have a flensing knife in the car. I don’t keep it in my kit. The blade’s too long.” He watched her face. She wanted it all. “Before rigor mortis sets in, I’d take your limbs in my hands and pull hard to loosen the joints. It’s easier to cut through the ligaments and cartilage if the joints are pulled apart manually. Then I’d slice through your arms just below your shoulder sockets and your legs just below your pelvis.”

She swallowed. “And what are you going to do with my arms and legs?”

“I’m going to put them in the oven, Tamara. It’s going to look like a madman was here. Just like you said.”

She pushed herself up to standing with difficulty and approached the bed. “But you’re telling me you’re not a madman.”

“I’m no madder than you. I’m suffering the pains of death, but they have not made me mad.” She stood at the side of the bed, her hand playing over one of the cloth straps. She slipped a forefinger under the steel latch that locked the clasp beside his shin and flipped it. He felt the belt loosen and she tugged on the cloth to pull it through the clasp. Then she loosened and removed the one on his pelvis. “I’d like to be taken off your medicines,” he said.

“You took four pints, you know. I had to steal them from the hospital’s blood bank. Luckily I’m not afraid of being fired.” She screwed closed the port on his arm and tied off the saline going into his hand. “You were practically hollow when I found you.”

He grieved the thought of having taken sustenance from unknown bodies. “I’m not supposed to take aid. I’m to go forth on my own strength.”

“You’d be dead, then,” she said. He felt the plastic stent slide out of the vein in his hand. “This last one is going to be a bit uncomfortable.” She reached down below the sheets and he felt her hand, warm, on the inside of his leg. With a sudden motion, she ripped tape from his inner thigh and then he felt the painful sensation of the catheter being drawn out of his urethra. He felt as if he were pissing fire. “Sorry,” she said.

 

Like most of the houses he entered, Tamara Laurence’s was spotless. He could never be sure if these houses had been cleaned for his benefit, or if a terminal illness naturally made people want to simplify their lives. He appreciated the respect it showed, whether for him, or for the coming of these many ends.

Her home was modest. Furnished in a spartan manner, with a couple of adornments about: an antique clock, a painting over the fireplace. No mirrors anywhere. He sat at her bare dining-room table as she put her kettle on and then came to join him. The hair she’d lost over a failed course of chemotherapy had grown in again, although it was new hair rather than old growth: it was soft and loose and thin. It had grown long enough that she could tie it back into a short ponytail that came down only to the nape of her neck.

At the table, he put his medicines down in a row and explained in what order he would apply them; what effect she would feel, and how long it would take for these compounds to go to work. When she’d thrown his bag, she’d smashed the bottles of slippery elm and henbane, the latter of which he used quite a bit, and he told her he was improvising now. She handled the individual jars with care, turning them in her hands. “Do you find people are ready when you come to them?”

“Most are,” he said.

“Are they frightened?”

“They have different reactions. Some are scared, but most of them are resigned. Or even relieved.”

“I’m not relieved.” She set the vials back down on the table in the order of their use and regarded them. “I liked being alive. I was good at it. I loved well and I worked well. I was good at my job.”

“You helped a lot of people.”

“An oncologist with cancer,” she said. “That’s not ironic. Good thing I didn’t choose a career in explosives.” She laughed and drew the first vial back toward herself. “So, this one for tea, then?”

“Yes,” he said.

She brought it into the kitchen with her and he told her how much of it to put into a cup and how much water. She stood in the doorway of the kitchen with the cup cradled in her hand.

“I’d like to die in bed. Is that okay?”

He followed her down the hall to her room. She put the tea down and undressed with her back to him. He had intended to release her from this obligation, in return for allowing him to continue. However, here she was, standing beside the bed, her body giving off a greyish glow, like a stone lit from within. She turned to face him, and he took in the bones pushing out from under her flesh. There were patches of liverish marks pocked over the surface of her belly and chest. She sipped her tea.

“I can’t tell if you’re examining a patient now or actually looking at a woman.”

“When I ask people to undress, I look for scars.”

“You didn’t ask me. But I did it anyway.”

“I had thought twice of it,” he said. His palms were buzzing. “But here you are.”

“I want to be seen. I want to be lit up in my last seconds on this planet.”

She had answered her own question–he was looking at a woman–and in doing so, he was reminded of all the things he had once been, when he’d been merely a man. He’d had no mission at all then, and life had been a series of tasks that he fulfilled with passion or without. Now it felt as if he were bodiless; he had lost his corporeality when his brother had fallen ill. He was a memory of his brother’s body that had been projected into the world.

But this woman reminded him that he had once wanted to express himself differently.

“I’m guessing you’re not the kind of guy who’d go to bed at a time like this,” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

“You’ll hold me at least. Right?”

He said he would. He collected the two remaining vials off the dining-room table and returned to her with them. “This is just pulverized ginger,” he said, holding up his right hand. “It’s a natural antiemetic.”

“I guess the other one is pretty nasty, then?”

“This is ground amanita. It’s a fungus.”

“My ex was an avid mushroomer. I know it.”

“Destroying Angel, some people call it.”

“Another exciting Sunday night in Pictou,” she said, and she sat down on the edge of the mattress, naked and shrunken, and looked up at him with her ruined face. He felt suddenly uneasy, but he was too focused to understand what it was that had distressed him. It was a cloud passing over the sun. “Let’s get going,” she said.

He sat with her and administered the belladonna. She grimaced at the taste of it. He started to mix the amanita into what remained of her tea, but she grabbed his wrist to stop him and began to weep. He held her against him, anxious now to be done, to be separated from her love of life and her agony at leaving. “I never prayed,” she said. “I don’t believe in any of that. What’s that going to mean when you try me out on your God, Simon? He’s not going to be happy.”

“You can come home whenever you’re ready, Tamara, even now.”

She released her grip on his wrist. The belladonna was already flowing through her–in a dose that high, it was almost enough to put her under. She took the amanita from his hand and walked back into her kitchen, where she poured a dram of the remaining hot water out of the kettle and into a glass. “How much?” she asked him.

“The equivalent of one grain is enough.” He watched her take twice that and mix it into the water. She took his hand and drew him down the hallway. In the bathroom, she cracked a syringe and filled it.

“Let’s not fool around now,” she said back in the bedroom. He tied her off and she expertly found the vein in the crook of her elbow and put the needle in. They both watched the milk-coloured liquid vanish into her arm. “You said you’d hold me. I want you to get out of your clothes.”

“Tamara–”

“You’ll never have to do anything I ask ever again.”

She reached for the button at the top of his shirt and he pulled away from her. “Get in,” he told her, and she drew back the covers and lay down. He undressed. In the bed, she folded herself around him.

“Tell me how long.”

“Minutes.”

They lay there in silence. “Turn off the lamp.” In the dark, he listened to her breathe.

He remembered what had disturbed him ten minutes ago. “It’s not Sunday night,” he whispered to her.

“You got here yesterday, Simon. You were out for more than a day. You almost died.”

He tried to sit up, but she held him there against the bed. She said, “I’m still here.” And then, “Still here,” and ten seconds later, she was dead in his arms and it was Sunday night and his plans were destroyed.

 

He was furious with himself. He carried her form down the hall, cooling against his nakedness, and to the stairs and brought her into the room where he’d lain insensate for twenty-four hours, hours during which he was supposed to have been making the final leg of his journey. He was meant to be in Trinity Bay tomorrow afternoon, celebrating completion, but now he was nowhere.

He’d followed his own rules, but instead of consecrating himself, he’d woken up to find himself fallen. He had not been right about his own strength.

He laid her on the bed in the basement, her body as light as air, this very body that had pressed itself to him, held him back, spoken to him, begged him. He dressed and went to the car and got his flensing knife out from under the back seat and dragged the tin cup through the stinking fluid he’d driven across the country. In the house, he tilted her head back and poured his brother’s blood into her, the blood of Victor Wente out of Oyen, Alberta, the blood of Elizabeth Reightmeyer from Norway House in Manitoba. Robert Fortnum, dead in Hinton, spread in her. Delia Chandler, Port Dundas, graced her. Father Price blessed her. He filled her with the congregation.

He could not cut her, though. She’d transited through human in his presence. She’d been too much with him. His weakness had brought him here and he could not bear it. He knelt by the edge of the bed she lay on and brought up the curving blade of the flensing knife, seeing the little light that was there in that now-silent place glint in the steel. He gave a cry of anger and brought the blade down hard against the bottom knuckle of his right thumb. With two levered sawing motions he had the thumb off and the digit, as if possessed of its own life, sprang free from him and bounced across the floor. He cried out in agony and doubled over onto Tamara Laurence’s cold belly, cradling the ruined hand between them.