17

SMARTER THAN, SAY, YOUR AVERAGE NEANDERTHAL…

THE MORNING AFTER is as jumpy as a blind date: feeling each other out, sizing each other up, cautiously wondering if there’s any future in this.

Not for Ruth; so she says.

In George’s room Greta and Sylvia apply themselves, not very vigorously, to George’s limbs. Only he slept well last night, securely tucked in by Diane, that nice girl, and comforted that in the end he must, after all, have misunderstood what Ruth said, and then whatever Greta was muttering on about when she took him back from Sylvia’s deck to his room. There are times when it’s not unpleasant to suppose he mishears—what he recalled was so impossible that it could be nothing to stay awake over, pending all coming clear, or just going away.

Greta slept for a while and then kept waking up startled. Each time the awakening was anxious, and she felt a little bit ill. In darkness the mind is too open to strangenesses that would not arise in the light. Last night her mind held for a few seconds after each waking such unhappy pictures, like ones that have not come to her for many years, of an old country and lost people that in the day she would be careful not to see, and even after they flickered and faded, as pictures in dreams can swiftly do, their sadness and their unease cling, they have seeped into the day.

If the pictures were not of Ruth or to do with Ruth, they must nevertheless be the fault of Ruth. For bringing unhappy ripplings into the heart. For raising distresses that should not be raised. And questions. Such as whether such a thing as Ruth asks can be true, and more than that, whether it can be done. There are certain words, too. Such as sin: the breaking of divine or moral law, especially by a conscious act. Such a short, very large word. How many sins are there—an endless number, it seems—and how are they to be compared to each other? How are they also to be compared to the good—possibly, how is mercy to be weighed against murder? Is murder the word? It seems to Greta it should mean there is an unwilling, resisting, taken-by-surprise victim, not someone who has made a request, but she could be wrong.

“Shall I read?” Ruth asks, newspapers ready beside her on George’s coffee table.

“Oh, not today, I think,” says Sylvia, who also slept badly. “It’s a little hard to spare much interest for the outside world when we’ve got a fair-sized elephant right here in the room.” She sounds as if she blames Ruth. So, to be honest, does Greta, although she’s unclear why Sylvia speaks of an elephant.

Sylvia’s tone softens. “You know, I have to ask, is it an illness?” By her current standards this is cautious and tactful, leaving the it hanging absent its antecedent; which would have to be the cause. The blunt death. The unfathomable desire.

Of course they are unhappy and troubled, and of course they want reasons, and Ruth has a laundry list—let them count right along with her, this in the dubious hope that their arithmetic and hers will arrive simultaneously at the same uncomplicated total. “No. I could lie to you, but as far as I know I’m not particularly ill beyond osteo and its effects, so I’m not trying to beat a terminal clock, if that’s what you mean. Actually it’s partly because I’m not sick, and I don’t want to be, either.”

As if anyone does.

“Look. Sometimes I see shapes and colours that I know aren’t really there. I think that’s just because of a new drug my doctor is trying, but in a way it’s also how I tend to see life: in a big curve, like a rainbow. It starts with an arc that shades upwards for a while, and then it goes along with bumpy patches but more or less nicely flat and pastel for quite a distance, until it begins heading downward. It declines and turns grey. And I don’t want to decline past a still fairly good, reasonably bright end point. As it seems to me too many lives do. As we can see here every day, with one person or another going downhill. So I want to grab the moment while I’m right between what’s worthwhile and what’s not.”

On those grounds should they all die, for heaven’s sake?

“I’m not personally particularly depressed or unhappy. I’ve had all the love I could bear, and I’m glad every day for every colour and sound—well, most of them—and for the Idyll Inn and being taken care of in all the ways I expected when I moved in, and for some of the people, like Diane when she comes around in the evenings to help, and for all of you, too. My friends, I feel.”

Never mind that there appear to be penalties for being Ruth’s friends. It’s not Sylvia’s fault, or Greta’s, or George’s, that they’re in the awkward, at best awkward, position of either defending life or having to consider helping to end one. Ruth gestures at the newspapers. “At the same time, I guess you could say I’ve given up on anything getting better, and I’m not interested in watching while it only gets worse.”

“What’s the it?” So George isn’t the only one who isn’t getting what’s going on, and at least Sylvia puts the confusion into clear words: What can Ruth mean?

“I mean, look at this day.”

Yes, so?

“This heat.”

Again—so? When Sylvia stuck her head out the doorway to her deck after breakfast, unlike yesterday the air was already stifling—so much for gathering out there later in private again. Such heat is good for arthritis, bad for breathing, and generally speaking people choose breath over pain relief; Ruth being, by her own account, an exception, evidently.

“Well, we know all these things, we keep reading about them. A day like today here. The whole upheaval of the earth.”

“You’re talking about climate change? As a reason to die? For God’s sake, Ruth, we’re old. What’s that to do with what’s left of our lives?”

“Not much personally, I guess. Except,” and Ruth smiles very briefly, “for being glad we have this excellent air conditioning that’s part of the problem. But climate is just one example.”

“Of what?”

“Of how stupid and destructive people are wherever you look, even just outside, into the air.” Now it’s Ruth who sounds angry. “We can think we’re doing good things now and then, but on the whole we’re not. On the whole we’re wreckers, we’re a ruinous species, and I’m tired of it. Just tired.”

She doesn’t sound tired, though; she sounds rather energetic, rather impassioned. In a funny way pleased, as well.

It is a way of seeing that perhaps comes from knowing too much, is that possible? So much Ruth reads to them, so many disasters and cruelties that Greta, for one, has not previously had time for, or she has had time but not a desire to know, and is this not in the end for the best? Knowing can lead, it seems, as with Ruth, to despair, but despair must be a battle, not a giving in. Despair is how Greta and Dolph came to land in this country, a long way, an ocean away, from hunger and guilt. Two of her older brothers, and her father and Dolph’s, wore uniforms, but they must have been only soldiers, as men had to be, and she would not believe they were ever bad men. But afterwards, in the shame, everyone suffered, wicked or good.

“This is a hard place now,” said her mother, who once had been plump. “We will find a way to help you to leave.” And so they did. And Greta and Dolph did not look back; would not. Except sometimes in small dreams, which cannot be helped.

“How can you think this?” Greta hears her own voice lifting and vibrating with, nearly, fury. “People work to live. All those you read us of, in starvation and war and illness, they will endure anything to be alive. They do not give up. We do not give up. Even without hope, we do not.”

She of all people should not have to say this to Ruth of all people.

In Greta’s mind’s eye, too, is Dolph, arms eternally flung upwards behind blank grey silo walls, helpless under the weight of feed corn pouring down—Dolph desperately drowning, struggling to live.

There is also a young woman alone in a strange land, rising every morning to care for her girls and search for work, and finding work, and raising her girls. Badly or well, going on. “It is our duty. We must.”

Greta’s face has gone cherry red, and there are big fat alarming tears in her eyes—what if she has another heart attack, what if Ruth inadvertently kills someone else? Even so: “I don’t mean to argue, Greta, but duty to whom? Who says we must? And I’m not the only one. I read about a woman, quite famous, who did exactly what I’m proposing for no obvious reason except she felt finished. Although she didn’t have osteo, so she managed it all by herself.” Then go ahead, why drag them into it? But nobody says that; not right now.

There is again this, too: that if Ruth had people to love and be loved by, if she had children, grandchildren, she could be upset about what lies ahead for them, as Greta can also be, now that she has heard so much on these subjects, but she would never be able to cause such an injury to loved ones—no. And so how sad for Ruth, to have no one like that.

How light, also; how freely Ruth must feel herself able to fly off the earth, without love and duty holding her down.

This is also not something to be said; except by Ruth, it seems. “I realize I might feel differently if I were wondering if a child’s marriage was going to hold up, or a grandchild would ever get a good job or have a healthy baby—that personal sort of care a parent would have. Not that I regret at all not having those particular ties. Although if Bernard were alive, it’d be different. Whether he was well or not, I couldn’t—wouldn’t want to—abandon him. But I have none of those pulls. All my work is done, and there’s also nothing more to be loved, and even if there were, I can’t feel any love in me to give. So I’m finished. But what I do have is the luxury of my own choice.”

Does choice go so far? Is this a moment to speak the word sin? Perhaps not. Or despair. Only listen, listen. To Ruth saying, “I understand you’ve got all sorts of reasons for living, Greta, your own desires and your daughters among them. But we all die at some point, every blessed one of us, so why not consider when that point could best be? It’s not as if thousands and thousands of people don’t die every moment from every imaginable cause—disease, carelessness, cruelty, just wearing out—we’re as disposable as ants. Maybe special ants, maybe not, but in any case, in a million-stars-in-the-sky, million-grains-of-sand-in-the-desert way, a death is only one more small thing. As am I, really. Even when death isn’t easy, it’s completely ordinary and normal.”

Normal, yes; ordinary, no. Even Greta understands that difference. How dare Ruth—what?—betray her cherished humans in this way? People are not stars in the sky or sand in the desert, how can Ruth especially, who seems always touched and troubled by indignation and sorrow, think such a thing? This is an unwillingness to go forward, an emptiness on such a scale that there is no answer to it that Greta can see. In fact there is a terrible absurdity—absurd: ridiculously unsound, without orderly relationship to life, lacking reason or value—to this whole conversation.

“And think,” Ruth is going on, “of the amount of death we’re all already responsible for.”

Oh honestly, that’s a bit much. “We’re hardly experienced assassins, Ruth,” Sylvia snaps.

“Maybe not directly, but nobody’s an innocent, either. We use the oil that people are killed for, we wear jewellery that miners and child soldiers die over—why, there’s been blood all over our engagement and wedding rings forever. Mine too, I realize that.”

Greta considers her silver bracelet with the engraved twining vines and two tiny diamonds, that gift from a grateful jeweller at a time, and a shabby ABC Motel place, when she was dying a little death of her own. But in comparison to what Ruth speaks of, that hardly counts.

“Coffee, tea, sugar, the fruit we keep in your fridge, Sylvia—farmers starve in other countries, and lose their land, and children die from crops being sprayed.”

“My goodness, that’s quite a list. Is there anything left we might still enjoy?” Sylvia sounds angry and amused both.

“Shoes,” George says suddenly. “Shoes,” he repeats. He means, if he could say it properly, cheap shoes people buy, the ones that come from countries where people work for slave wages and get mutilated by machines and burned up in locked factories in the manufacture of bargains—those people die, and his business where shoes are not shoddy and cheap dies too—he would never be able to say all that, so he just says, “Shoes,” for the third time, and bangs his right fist on the arm of his wheelchair.

They leave the usual pause to allow him to imagine they have any idea what he’s talking about. “Yes,” Greta says finally. “You are no doubt right, George.”

“Damn. Don’t.” Patronize him, he means. Pat him on the head like a child.

Should he have died on the floor of his kitchen? If he’d known then what he knows now, would he have let himself go?

He thinks not. Even as things stand, he would not.

But he can almost see why a person who’s not like him might.

Why shouldn’t Ruth get what she wants? Somebody should.

He remembers a story Ruth read to them—yesterday? months ago?—about a feeble former South American dictator, elderly, their age, charged at last for a few of his many long-ago crimes: opponents attached to electrodes, deprived of food, water, sleep, warmth; women subjected to particular torments as, Ruth pointed out, women always are; and, an unpleasant twist new to George, live, struggling, bound prisoners tossed from helicopters to, far below, wherever they landed. Because he was feeble and old, the newspaper said some people thought he should be left in peace with his infirmities and, if such existed, his conscience. And Sylvia laughed in that barking way of hers, and said, “See? If you live long enough you get off the hook for anything. Isn’t that insulting? If I were him, I’d be furious. I’d want to hurl somebody right out of a plane.”

Ha ha ha. But maybe that’s the kind of thing that made Ruth think they too could do anything and still get off the hook. That they’d help her because they’re old and she’s old and nobody would notice or care.

“My point,” Ruth is saying, “is that what I’m talking about is just more immediate than some of the things we’re already responsible for. Only one step past knowing.”

“Rather more than a step, I think.” Sylvia, chilly.

“You know,” as if Ruth didn’t hear, “there was a time when I assumed human nature had to be on an upswing, give or take the occasional genocide, the kind of mass insanity that causes a holocaust.” She glances at Greta, then away; ordinarily she wouldn’t make such a reference. “But mainly I figured that in the evolutionary nature of things, humans had to be improving. Now I can’t imagine why I thought any such thing. Now I think, no, we know more—we can know practically anything we set out to learn—so in some ways we’re smarter than, say, your average Neanderthal, but we’re no better. And there’s nothing better to look ahead to. There’s no chance of a magic moment when people will realize they could stop causing grief, there’ll just be the same old famines and slaughters and, okay, some rescues and acts of generosity here and there, on and on. Nothing, nothing at all, will ever be new, except perhaps in the details.”

As if everyone is so wicked. What about goodness, the good acts people perform, their goodwill, is that nothing? Why, some people give their whole lives to goodness. Not Greta, of course, and not George or Sylvia, either. Maybe that’s why Ruth thinks they’ll help.

“So as I say, as you see, I’m just about done. Nearly out of steam. I’m not depressed in the ways doctors talk about, and I don’t actively hate my life—in fact it’s quite lovely much of the time, and even especially lovely these days, with a deadline coming up, as it were, and there’s a great deal I’m fond of, including you three. I realize it’s unusual to feel this is it, but I assure you, it isn’t unique. I want to be clear, I wouldn’t like any misunderstandings.”

They’re four people in a room; of course three of them aren’t going to entirely hear what Ruth must think she is saying—how could she have spent a lifetime with other human beings and still, even now, not know that? Even a golfer, a bridge player, a board chair, much less a mother or a father, knows more about misunderstanding than that. Still, no point saying so if Ruth is as finished as she says, with no more to learn. “Tell me,” Sylvia says instead, “did you cultivate Greta and George and me because you thought from the start we’d be likely candidates? Was there something when you first clapped eyes on us that made you say to yourself, There’s a bunch of killers, if ever I saw a bunch of killers?”

Even with its morsel of truth, that’s just crude. “If you remember,” Ruth says, “we drifted into the lounge at roughly the same time that first week, no mystery about it, just serendipity. But now there’s nobody else here I would trust to ask, and we’ve shown how we’ll look after each other, as best we can.”

Sylvia wasn’t a lawyer’s wife, or for that matter a lawyer’s lover, for nothing. She wouldn’t have minded being a lawyer herself, come to that. “So just to be straight, you’re reasonably pleased with your days and your friends, you’re not depressed, but you’re discouraged by human nature, there are wars, lies and tortures, and enough carelessness and greed that the earth itself is on its last legs, and you can’t see anything getting better, if anything only worse, and you’ve decided you’re done, finished, ready to shuffle off this mortal coil altogether, preferably with our help and at least in our company, because even if just about everything else on earth is doomed, we are friends—is that a fair summary, do I have it right?”

Ruth frowns. How fierce Sylvia sounds. “More or less.” Less, really.

“Then I’d have to say that’s all a pretty big crock, wouldn’t you?”