In some ways, the year of trying to save him is much easier than the years of trying to forget him and the months of trying to hold on to him. Those times I was alone. All I had for a lure was myself. Whereas everybody he knows wants to save him, and the lure, this time, is the whole world.
At first, he doesn’t oppose us. He checks himself into the Marwood Clinic. Despite relapsing, he continues to go to twice-weekly meetings for another three months. The reason he stops going is not clear, something to do with his counsellor quitting. “If he would only come home,” Mrs. Richter says,“we could watch over him.” Which is exactly why he won’t go home. He stays on in the basement apartment where he has been living ever since the rooming house sold in the spring of 1975. At around the same time, the piano bar at the hotel closed down, and that’s when he started driving a taxi. Does he ever drive drunk? I ask him this while he’s still in the hospital; I think it’s a question that needs to be asked. He says no, and I find I believe him. For one thing, I realize that he wouldn’t risk anybody else’s life. What he likes about the job, he says, is that he can set his own hours and travel all over the city, meeting new people, hearing their stories. He’s thinking of writing some of the stories down. He sounds hopeful.
But then he always sounds hopeful. When he quits driving, and then when he starts spending almost all day in bed, he claims to be catching up on his reading, learning to meditate. “Everything is fine,” he says up until the day he dies.
On my birthday I stop in to see him before going out to dinner with Suzanne. He has a gift for me. Some small thing he has wrapped, without tape, in a page torn from one of his books.
“A rock,” I say, feeling it. I unwrap it, and it is a rock. “Just what I always wanted.”
“It’s a meteorite,” he says.
I look at it more closely. It’s black and rust coloured. Glossy.
“A piece of the solar system,” he says. I reach for his hand and kiss it. “Where did you get it?”
“I bought it.”
“Really?” I didn’t think he had the strength to go any farther than across the street to the liquor store. “Years ago,” he says.
I look at the torn-out page. It’s Rimbaud’s “Romance.” All four stanzas. “At last,” I say.
“‘You’re in love,’ “he says, quoting from it. “Your sonnets make her laugh. All your friends disappear.’ “And then he coughs and a jet of blood lands on my lap. “Oh, God.” I jump up. “Oh, God.”
“Sorry.” He wipes his mouth with a handkerchief.
The blood slides down my skirt. “Let’s go to the hospital,” I say.
“I’ll clean it up,” he says, coming to his feet.
“For God’s sake, Abel! This is an emergency!”
He stands there looking at the floor, waiting for me to calm down. “I’ll clean it,” I say and head for the bathroom.
When I come back out, he’s on his hands and knees, dabbing a sponge at a spot on the carpet. I sit on the bed. Every few seconds he separates the fibres with his fingers, then gets back to dabbing. He bites his lip. His arms shake. I should probably take over except I’ve fallen into a kind of stupor where I seem to be watching him as though he were a stranger in a movie. Who is he? Why is he so thin and pale?
He glances up. “It’s better to get it out right away,” he says, and a feeling of pure, ungrasping compassion comes over me for this skeletal human being who is still trying so hard to protect everyone from himself. Not from his claims; he never made those. From his detachment. It occurs to me that the distance I seem to be holding him at right now is the one he has always maintained between himself and the rest of the world. How else do you preserve the illusion that the people you love are perfect? Or that you can bear to let them go?
“I’m sorry,” I say. Sorry for the way things are, naturally, but as I speak I’m wondering, why is it that, between us, I got all the anger? I can’t believe I sent him that letter.
He stops dabbing and gives me a tender look. “I’m fine now,” he says. “Everything’s fine.”
I nod.
“You’ll be fine, too.”
“I know.”
I leave at about nine o’clock. Some time over the next three hours he takes off his clothes, gets a blanket, a bottle of whisky and a bottle of tranquilizers and goes to the roof of his apartment building. It’s a clear night. Lots of stars. He drinks the whisky and swallows the pills, then lies on the blanket.
He is found a little after midnight by Archie, the superintendent, who wondered why the door to the transformer, which is the same door leading to the roof, was ajar.