The dead are disfigured by language, yet gleaming through it.
Perth to Sydney. Sydney to Los Angeles. Los Angeles to Tijuana. Tijuana to . . .
When I was a kid, my mom’s friend Mrs. Doyle used to come over some afternoons. Ann Doyle was British and wore glasses with thick lenses. She’s what my mother would call a character. She was already experiencing cognitive problems, though we did not know this at the time. Mrs. Doyle had four daughters: Stephanie, Sally, Christine, and Erin.
Then one of the daughters died. You knew that, right? The dead are . . . irretrievable. I expect you knew that too. But I want to try to retrieve Erin for you.
Erin often came with her mother, who picked her up after school. She was the youngest of the girls, though a year or two older than me. The three elder daughters all had red hair and were deeply freckled, but Erin had dirty-blonde hair that was slightly unkempt, a snub nose, and brown skin with patches of sunburn.
While our mothers sat in the kitchen and drank tea and gossiped, Erin and I would go into the lounge room and lie on the carpet and watch TV. Reruns of Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry. Those old cartoons were bright and jazzy, and above all, they were violent.
We would watch, riveted, as these cute fluffy creatures were flattened with huge frying pans, run over by trains or trucks, blown to bits by cherry-red sticks of dynamite, and shattered by cannonballs; we would regard the screen in silence as these adorable yet malevolent characters fell from great heights and were smashed to pieces on the rocks or sidewalk below, or found themselves riddled with so many bullet holes that rain poured through their furred or feathered skin like a sieve; we would laugh as the critters drank poison from bottles on which the skull and crossbones had been slyly scratched out, so that their feet turned a shade of soda-pop orange that rapidly made its way up their little bodies ’til flames fizzed out of their pointy or floppy ears.
During the commercials, Erin and I would assess each other’s sunburn, pull long strips of skin off each other’s shoulders, hold the strips up to the light. We believed that if we kept peeling, we would uncover the skeletons crouching beneath us, just as if you dug a hole that was deep enough, you would end up in China.
Other days we would play outside. The backyard was ideal for children, overgrown and ragged and full of mysteries.
There was a charred tree we liked to climb; its trunk was wide and oddly shaped, with ledges you could perch on, like a weird wooden mountain, and in our games that’s exactly what it was, the Alps, the Andes, the Himalayas.
We climbed the living trees as well, a pine tree, several gum trees, and a jacaranda; its purple blossoms would stick in our hair. We ate plums from the plum tree and rubbed the juice from the plums on the warts that occasionally appeared on our fingers or knees, an old wives’ remedy.
And our rusty hulk of a barbecue served as a set on a stage. Reenacting Hansel and Gretel, we would take turns being the witch and try to push each other in.
I no longer have access to these games, their rules, their laws.
I can almost see us playing—Erin’s barefoot, wearing her green Santa Maria tunic. I’m in my gray school shorts and gray short-sleeved cotton shirt—but no matter how high I turn up the volume, I cannot hear what we said to one another.
(By the way, Erin was deaf in one ear; one of her red-haired sisters stuck a Q-tip in too deep and it punctured her eardrum.)
It’s as if both Erin and I created a new game, whose sole purpose was to keep things from you and from me.
Those afternoons are crudely stitched together; not much stands out, apart from one afternoon when Erin and I looked at a Playboy magazine.
By then we must have been twelve and ten, respectively.
Erin brought it over—she had nicked it from her dad’s stash. Her father was already exhibiting violent tendencies, though we did not know this at the time.
We hid behind some shrubs and studied the pictures. With their enormous breasts and asses and thighs, the women were like giants: voluptuous, obscene. As the sunlight filtered in through the leaves, I stared at the magnetic space between the women’s legs, with no sense that I had come from such an opening.
I observed that the images formed stories. There was one spread that began with a woman being stripped in a restaurant kitchen by a group of chefs, men wearing checked pants, white jackets and aprons, white puffy hats. After some fondling, the chefs pushed her into an industrial-sized oven. At the end of the story, she was laying on a wooden table, slathered in whipped cream, like a cream puff, portions of her body strategically bare. The chefs stood above her with knives and forks, grinning. The caption: Good Enough to Eat.
When we were finished with the images, or the images were finished with us, we put the porno down and examined each other’s bodies, half in darkness, half in light: a mode of exploration that seemed a natural progression from the inspection of our sunburn.
I wish I could say that our mothers came outside and caught us, mouths agape. Our mothers were appalled and we never saw each other again.
All I can offer is that these afternoon visits dwindled away. Erin and I grew up, and apart—our minor age difference took on greater import. She stopped coming over. We withdrew from childhood at a separate pace and developed our own interests, too fragile to articulate, too nebulous to share with anyone.
Perth to Brisbane. Brisbane to Honolulu. Honolulu to San Diego. San Diego to Tijuana. Tijuana to . . .
One night, around two years ago, I was talking to my mother on the phone. I call her every fortnight on a Sunday evening. I asked her what had been going on, and she got quiet for a moment and then she said to me, “Do you remember Erin Doyle?”
I had not seen Erin in more than twenty-five years. I hadn’t thought of her either. I had kind of . . . erased her. Memory, or at least my memory, is a device inside of me that erases memories. Either my device is faulty or nothing gets erased permanently.
I told Mum of course I remembered Erin.
“Well,” she said, her voice rising out of the quiet, “I’m afraid I have some sad news. Erin died, she . . . killed herself.”
My mother’s breathing was shallow. I gave her time to catch her breath. Then she told me Erin’s story, in chronological order.
I’m the world’s worst listener, except when the subject is death and my ears prick up.
It seems Erin had been depressed for some time, possibly her entire life, but had managed to make a go of it. She found herself a nice husband and they raised three lovely kids. Although she and her husband were separated, they’d recently had their fourth child. This had been hard on Erin; hit with postpartum depression, she’d been involuntarily admitted with her newborn girl to the Mother Baby Unit at Fremantle Hospital, two floors above the ward where she had just given birth. The walls of the ward are painted orange and, oddly enough, blue, my mother told me, to help lift the patients’ spirits.
After several weeks, the hospital discharged Erin and she left the new baby with her husband and the other kids, telling him that she was going down south for a few days, she needed to gather herself, needed a little peace and quiet.
Instead of driving to Margaret River, a popular resort town a couple hours south of Perth—I hear it’s beautiful, though I’ve never been—Erin headed to the airport. She boarded a plane to Tokyo. But she didn’t stop there. Next, she took a flight to San Francisco, then on to Mexico City and back to Tijuana—so, in a sense, she wasn’t lying, she did go down south, to Mexico, where, she had heard, you could easily buy this drug, Nembutal, a barbiturate veterinarians use, to put animals to sleep. Erin had read that it was the best drug to take if you wanted to commit suicide; it made for a gentle death. She bought a bottle at a store.
It took them a few days, but Erin’s sisters realized something was up. At her flat they found printouts of various travel itineraries, comparing routes and prices to Tijuana, tucked into a book on euthanasia. Stephanie and Christine flew all the way to Tijuana themselves—by way of Sydney, and Los Angeles, I believe—and tracked Erin down. She was still alive, but barely, in a coma in a room in a rundown hospital. Erin died four days later.
It’s just so awful,” my mom said when she finished. “The husband is so lovely and now he’s left with those kiddies and the baby. Poor Ann is devastated. You two were quite friendly when you were children. It must be upsetting to hear this.”
“Yes,” I said. I have no trouble lying to my mother, but it’s more difficult lying to you. You can see right through me.
I think I was . . . surprised that someone from so long ago could reappear in such a manner, through disappearing, just like that.
After I got off the phone, I jotted down some notes. I thought about what Mom said, that Erin may have been depressed ever since she was a young girl. I willed myself to go back to that time, to summon more memories of Erin, to see if I could locate any signs, but I couldn’t.
You know what came to mind? Those dumb cartoons we watched. In every episode, one of those chirpy animals was mortally wounded, yet they would laugh it off, take a dip in a cooling body of water to extinguish the fire that had burned them to a crisp, brush off the black gunpowder with their wings or paws or claws, unflatten or dehole themselves, cheerfully reassemble their severed limbs and appendages, and get back to the chase.
No one—Tom, Jerry, Sylvester, Tweetie-Bird, Coyote, or Road-Runner—ever truly died. Whether the character was sympathetic or diabolical—like most children I rooted for the so-called villains, though good and evil is complicated in the Looney Tunes and cannot be taken at face value—they all knew how to outwit death. No matter how extreme the incident, how pulverized they were, how torn apart, each technicolor creature would return from the dead; the cute little guys would die and be reborn over and over again in an endless bright loop of violence.
Everything else in my head was a blur, and so was Erin. Death . . . smudges us. Sometimes death makes people clearer, sharpens their outlines, but not Erin. She was more indefinite than ever.
Turns out I didn’t need to write any of it down because there was so much about her in the papers back home; it was all over the news. One of the tabloids printed a photograph from the wedding day of one of Erin’s sisters. The wedding party is dressed as you would expect: white for the bride, tuxes for the groom and best man, pastels for the bridesmaids and matrons of honor. Everyone appears to be delighted, exuberant.
But there’s a woman standing off to the side, dressed in black, some vintage frock from the 1940s by the look of it; she’s wearing a black pillbox hat and black net veil that conceals her face. Erin looks out of place yet stylish, nothing like the straggly girl I remembered. I couldn’t make out her expression through the dense black veil.
Naturally, the papers stretched the truth, misrepresented the facts, until it was hard to tell what was a fact and what was embellished:
They said that 39-year-old Erin Berg purchased the 100 ml emerald green bottle of Nembutal hidden in the garish papier-mâché belly of a piñata—the drug was routinely smuggled across the U.S. border in this manner. The smashed remnants of the piñata and the candy crammed inside were scattered on the floor of her hotel room, near her comatose body.
Every article referred to the book her sisters found in her flat, a book by a Dr. Philip Nitschke, a vocal advocate for voluntary euthanasia and the rights of the terminally ill. (When my mother mentioned this, I thought she said that Erin had been reading a book by Nietzsche.)
Erin’s copy—borrowed from her local library and severely overdue—was full of Post-its, apparently, pink and yellow and blue; key passages had been highlighted with fluorescent markers, also pink and yellow and blue. Was there a secret code at work in the trio of colors? one weekly asked.
The three sisters were seeking to have the book banned, arguing that it was the doctor who planted the idea of a pleasant, effortless death in the mother of four’s head, and misled the vulnerable young woman regarding the efficacy of Nembutal.
Although the dog-eared copy had been confiscated as probable evidence, one paper got hold of some journal entries that Erin had supposedly written in the book. The journals were clearly fabricated, turning her death into a sentimental daytime soap opera, except for a line or two, which I wanted to believe she actually wrote, that made Erin come off like some bleak philosopher: “We’re all involuntarily admitted into the world,” the doomed mother pronounced in her last entry, scribbled hurriedly before she rushed to the airport. “Suicide allows us to be discharged from the world, voluntarily.”
I read up a little on that doctor myself, ordering some of his books from my local library. He’s somewhat of an inventor. He’s designed these suicide machines—the technical term is euthanasia device—to assist people in the process of ending their lives.
There’s one called the Deliverance Machine, which, from what I could gather, is a software program that asks the participant a number of questions and, if you give the right answers, automatically injects you with a shot of barbiturates. It’s intended for individuals suffering from incurable, painful diseases, but the Deliverance Machine would have an allure for individuals subject to suffering in all its shapes and forms; such a machine could be of use to the individual who, for whatever reason, has suicidal ideation, for whom suicide is the idée fixe . . .
There was a picture of this strange machine: an old-fashioned gray laptop hooked up to a device in a carrier case that resembled a portable record player—perhaps it was the headphones. As I gazed at the contraption, an erasing device if ever there was one, I wondered about the voice that asks the questions. I imagined it was vocoded, soothing. Or like the smooth, unmodulated voice of an airline hostess who does those safety videos. What if you gave the answers the machine wanted to hear and were taken to the final screen, but then changed your mind at the last minute—was there a back arrow?
These appliances are pricey and hard to come by, so Nitschke has written other books, DIY guides for the handyman who wants to fix everything. These books come with diagrams and simple instructions, showcasing assisted suicide gadgets anyone can make, potentially, out of everyday household products lying around unused such as gas bottles from barbecues, nitrogen canisters that can also be utilized to brew your own beer, plastic shopping bags with draw cords (the correct term is Exit Bags), rubber tubing, strong tape. Put it all together, and hey, presto!
I have to say I became quite engrossed in these inventions. I could feel Erin reading along with me, over my shoulder, tracking each line with her finger. Looking at the pictures gave me a cold, shiny feeling, one I had not felt in a long time. I had to force myself to stop. I’d planned on renewing the books, but another member of the library had requested them. Not wanting to risk a fine, I returned the books to the Venice library before their due date. I made photocopies of the instructions for a couple of the simplest machines. I’m not very good with my hands, so, luckily, I don’t think I would be capable of building one myself.
Maybe Erin felt the same. That’s why, instead of taking her life in the privacy of her own home, or in a little cottage down south, she took the cab to Perth International Airport and hopped on a plane.
How much luggage did she bring? I assume she traveled light. The duration of the flight from Perth to Tokyo is approximately ten hours and eighteen minutes. Tokyo to San Francisco takes approximately nine hours and twenty minutes. San Francisco to Mexico City is approximately four hours and twenty-five minutes, and from there the flight to Tijuana is another three hours and twenty-one minutes—the exact time of each flight depends on the speed of the winds. That’s a long haul, not to mention stopovers. Erin would not have reached her destination until a day or so later, or earlier, or whatever, what with all the changes in time zones.
What time zone is the afterlife in? Erin allegedly wrote that as well, in the index of Nitschke’s book, next to Nembutal and nitrogen canister.
More importantly, how did Erin dress for the journey? In my one dream of her, she decided to take, as the saying goes, nothing but the clothes on her back. She did not have a clothes iron so she came over to our house and I helped her set up the ironing board in the laundry and she ironed her Santa Maria tunic. I told her the school uniform was a good choice, loose-fitting. Make sure you unplug the iron, she told me. She put on the green tunic and left for the airport. Whatever Erin chose to wear, I hope she dressed comfortably.
Erin flew to her death, like Mike, but with greater intention. I want to be as untraceable as nitrogen: more of Erin’s “thoughts,” before the paper’s “exclusive” was exposed as a fake.
The reasoning behind her choice is beyond me, beyond everyone, far beyond the sorrow of her mother and sisters, her husband and children, a secret code known only to Erin, yet I can’t help but . . . admire her method. I don’t mean the Nembutal, I mean the trip. In classical fiction, the journey to the underworld is grueling, perilous, and Erin . . . mimicked that undertaking, mirrored death’s steps, doubled them.
To go far away to end your own life. I could say more on the subject of suicide in general, but it will take me off course, divert me from my own intentions. So can we save that conversation for a rainy day?
There is something, though, that I need to get off my chest.
Details have been coming back to me while I’ve been telling you Erin’s story, in what I consider chronological order, and I may have mixed up one or two things. For one, Erin was not the only blonde; I’m pretty sure Christine was blonde too. I’m beginning to think she was the youngest, not Erin; Christine came over with her mother as well, possibly more often than her older sister. And that incident involving the Q-tip might have happened in reverse: Erin may have punctured Christine’s eardrum. I honestly don’t recall.
I suppose I could ask my mom next time I talk to her on the phone. She mentions Mrs. Doyle now and then, says she hasn’t been herself since Erin’s death; she lives in a small house with her stray dogs, goes to bed by six o’clock.
As for the afternoon with the Playboy, neither sister was present; that took place with a boy from my neighborhood, Mark, who, like Erin, had dirty-blonde hair and a snub nose and was perpetually sunburned. I’m no better than those journalists, I guess; I’ve offered a misleading impression. No, I’ve imparted a false account of Erin, warped and twisted her truth out of shape, like death distorts us beyond recognition.
All I have left are more questions:
On the customs form, what address did Erin give as her final destination? A customs officer surely inquired about the purpose of her trip. How did she respond? What did she declare?
And how did she spend all those hours in the air? Twenty-seven hours, twenty-four minutes, if my arithmetic is right. Did she sleep most of the time? Aware of the void that was awaiting her, did she stay up every minute, taking full advantage of the meals and the beverages and the snacks, of the in-flight entertainment? Or did she just stare at the video monitor that tracks the plane’s movement, indicating how many miles and hours to go until you get to your location?
Erin is, more than ever, irretrievable. If she could hear what I was saying, I doubt she would even want to be retrieved. There is no black box for the dead’s thoughts. Her thoughts on that journey are lost to us.
But now that I’ve acknowledged the instability of my memory, let’s embellish, let’s distort freely, in this story of the only blonde in a family of redheads, of my one true childhood friend: before she got to Tijuana (and she didn’t stop there . . .), Erin experienced an intoxicating sensation, hard to put into words—no, make that impossible—something along the lines of . . . liberty. She could not remember the last time she felt so light, and, wishing she could go on flying forever, wrote on the back of the customs form maybe this is what death is like, always moving, always between places, enclosed in a pressurized state of weightless, dreamlike suspension.