68.

Over breakfast of cereal, I text Dom:

Hey, mate, I have to cancel today. Sorry about the late notice. Some stuff’s come up. Please read the script. I know you haven’t, and I don’t want to get into an argument but I know you just bluff your way through these meetings all the time. Be prepared come Thursday. I want to succeed. I want you to succeed. But you really have to do this for me and for yourself.

It’s a shit, passive-aggressive message, but I think of being straight out with Lana last night, and that worked. Well, sorta. Well, until the morning.

Dom texts back immediately: Ok

And I think he’ll be just like Lana, seemingly responding to me being straightforward, but then they’ll revert to type, because we just about always revert to type, which makes me think that’s me, too, though, and this whole exercise is trying to avoid type.

Some unease slips in then, and I can’t mitigate it sitting at the computer trying to write, masturbating and thinking of Kylie, or standing overlong in the shower, letting the hot water stream over me, because while I’m sure there’s a futility in this, some fucking glimmer – some speck that’s not evening a glimmer, but some residual glow – still wants to burn, and that powers me to keep trying.

Come mid-afternoon, I make the trip to visit my mum, expecting the typical vile rants, but she’s subdued in bed, staring off at the cornice opposite her with such intent I’m sure she’s seeing something – what, I don’t know, but it doesn’t stop me continually checking, like it might become apparent if I give it enough attention.

“I split up with Lana,” I say, after several minutes.

Mum says nothing. She lays two fingers from her right hand on her left wrist.

“My friends and I are making a film,” I say.

I usually don’t go into this – she doesn’t understand any artistic aspiration. She can see it’s occurring but, like Lana, doesn’t understand the equation of effort not warranting a commensurate return. If I’ve tried to point out other people have succeeded, well, they’re just other people. That could never be me.

“I murdered two people,” I say. “Well, manslaughter, really. But they’re back.”

Mum rolls her head toward me. Her eyes are misty. “I’m sorry,” she says.

“For …?”

But she returns her attention to the cornice, and I know this isn’t a specific sorry for one thing, or an indifferent sorry, but an all-purpose sorry, because what I feel in that room – what inexplicably seizes me until it’s all I know – is this apology is aimed at my life, at all the condemnations, at all the fear-mongering, at all the pessimism. None of it was intentional, nor malicious. But it was destructive. Debilitating. Obviously. Because here I am.

Mum lifts her right hand to her chest, then she coughs once, which leads to a strangled wheeze as her mouth opens in shock. Her left arm spasms.

I see the life fading from her face – what is that? There’s all the clichés about seeing a corpse, about how they lack that spark of life, but I think I see something like that now. I don’t know if it’s spiritual or simply physical, that the heart that pumped blood through her body is shutting down, and as it shuts down, all those organs that have kept her alive shut down, and that’s reflective in her complexion, or if it’s a case of her soul absconding, and that’s the power and light within her flesh that leaves her body fading to nothing.

Then she’s gone.

I keep sitting there, note that her chest is still, that her mouth has formed in the smallest, yet surprised “o”, and feel a strange emptiness.

It’s not like she factored much in my life anymore, but she existed. Then I can only think of the worst comparison: our shaggy mutt, Bobby, who’d use a paw to draw open the screen door, let himself in, and go sit on one of the chairs or, if it was vacant, sprawl out on the couch. He was always happy to just be around one of us, never asking for anything more than the companionship, but when he died, you felt the absence, you felt that lack of entrenchment in our world.

A nurse comes in. Or a carer. I’ve never known what the titles are of the people in this place – she’s a young woman, only in her twenties, pretty but haggard, her navy polo and slacks too tight, but not in a sexualized way. I don’t know why I’m even trying to describe this.

She stops at the foot of Mum’s bed, immediately assesses the situation, then is out the door. About thirty seconds later, others come in with her – more nurses or orderlies or carers or whatever they are, but also a doctor, who I can identify because she has a stethoscope. There. TV’s taught me that’s how to identify doctors.

The doctor applies the round thingy bit of the stethoscope (I think it’s called something banal, like a “chestpiece”) to Mum’s chest and listens, then moves the chestpiece by about an inch, listens, then does that one final time.

I don’t need to be told Mum’s dead, but the doctor does it anyway.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” she says.

69.

On the drive home, I only briefly consider resetting, and that’s when I think about the good times we had, although they never elicit any warmth. It must be me. Or at least that’s what occurs to me initially. Then I decide it’s not because of me (or solely because of me), but because I don’t think those memories were particularly warm, but serviceable.

What I do recollect too much is living in a state of dread, worrying I’d set her off. Her responses were never malicious. They were just her – a migrant who’d come to a new country and probably lived in constant fear herself that this gamble she’d taken would backfire, and it’d lead to the ruin of her and all of us.

At home, I make the necessary calls to have her body transported to the morgue, then make some calls to a funeral home to get that organized. The director I speak to tells me a lot of the organization will have to wait until Monday, and books me in at 3.00pm (his first availability) to come in and choose the coffin, how the service will proceed, and all that.

Thanking him, I hang up, then begin the long, arduous process of notifying all the relatives – and there are a lot of them. This wouldn’t have been unexpected, so that’s one thing. Platitudes range from thoughts and prayers being with me (what would prayers do at this point?), to the old philosophical she’s at peace now, to the handful who offer to help, or ask me over for a meal or something like that – I thank them but say I’d rather be alone, although that’s just me most of the time anyway.

I consider ringing Autumn to let her know, although she never met my mother, so it’s really an excuse just to call her. That feels wrong. Is wrong. Like I’m sullying reconnecting with something that shouldn’t sully it. It’s the last cycle. That was so fucked. That’s what I really want to fix, but a phone call won’t do it. Text is cheap. I should do this in person. I should apologize. I should make things as right as I can.

Which leaves me with the day, and nothing to do but think about the why of my mother died in this cycle.

The first time it was me.

Then Autumn.

Then the two people in the car accident.

And now my mother.

I don’t understand the symmetry of it, although at least there’s some relief in it – that she’s finally able to relinquish her suffering, although maybe that’s my rationalization. Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe. I’m convincing myself now. This is the cycle I put everything right – I know that’s a conceit, but feel some belief that I have to get this right.

So when Stan texts me later that evening, I tell him I’m coming over, and order an Uber. It’s a different driver, though, although that makes me feel good. This is new. Well, newish. I’m still heading over for what’ll largely be drinking and chatting (and no doubt going out), but it’s a different start.

Once I get to Stan’s, it’s the same thing: greeting, grabbing a beer, sitting on the couch, watching football, then putting 1980s music on the TV’s YouTube ap, and Stan even says the exact same thing to me: “Thought you’d be out with Lana tonight.”

“We broke up,” I say.

“Oh, sorry to hear that.”

“Such is life.”

“Yeah?”

That’s not what I said last time. And it’s not how he responded. I have to wrack my memory to recall I gave him a quote from the movie The Lost Boys, and he finished it, which kept the mood light-hearted.

“Things not good?” Stan says. “Well, obviously not. But to get to a break-up, they mustn’t have been good for a while – unless you cheated on her.”

“No.”

“She cheat on you?”

“It just wasn’t working.”

“Why not?”

“You’re divorced – you know, things don’t work.”

“You seemed happy. Well, once.”

“You know what the problem with relationships is? There’s that honeymoon period when you’re good to each other. And then that stops. I don’t get it. Like, until I started getting fed up with the relationship, I behaved to Lana the way I did from the start. I’d bring her flowers for no reason. Do nice little things.”

Unresolved anger vents from me – this is the problem with no responding in kind to Lana: I haven’t exorcised this shit from me. And, as I get up to grab another two beers from the fridge, I feel like I’ve fallen into a slipstream I can neither escape, nor want to.

“She wasn’t like that,” I tell Stan, as I sit back on the couch. “The relationship became very … functional.”

Stan smirks. “That’s what love is – a function we think we need, coupling with somebody else because it does whatever it’s meant to do. What? Complete you? Have a family? Give you a lifelong companion? Fuck, I don’t know. But you know what the problem is?”

“I’m sure you’re gonna tell me,” I say.

“At the start you’re on your best behaviour,” Stan says. “You don’t fart in front of your partner. You’re not rude to waiters. You don’t snap at idiots on the road. It’s all best behaviour. It’s all shopfront shit. But that changes.” He laughs. “I remember once about six months into my relationship, Terri brought over dinner – it was some spicy Indian takeaway. About an hour later, I could hear her stomach rumbling. Another hour later, she goes to the bathroom. She doesn’t come back for like ten minutes. By that stage, I need a slash, so I go in there and I cannot describe to you the smell I encountered. It was like how could a woman Terri’s size, with the fucking butt she has, who’s always so pristine and presentable, produce a smell you could bottle and sell as a chemical weapon?”

“How’re we having this conversation?”

Stan laughs again. “Because it’s reality. She snores, too. Loud. Really loud. And, in the morning, no makeup?” He shakes his head. “She’s a troll.”

“This is a wonderful character assassination.”

“That’s not what I’m doing – I’m just saying that once that honeymoon period’s done, once you’re no longer on your best behaviour, you see the ugly side of your partner. That’s what proves if your love’s real – if you can still love them, and take them for everything they are.”

“So your dream died, huh?”

“Her dream died. Me.” Stan shrugs. “There’s an ugly side. But we lived the illusion for a while. That’s your problem.”

“My problem?”

“You want nothing but the illusion.”

“I don’t think that’s true.”

“Isn’t it?”

I think about it, but I’m sure I don’t. Lana could get ugly – rant pettily, make stupid jokes that were so inane I’d question her intelligence, and she did snore. On the flip, I know she struggled to deal with my temper, my flippancy, my dedication to writing.

And I was with her years, although I don’t know now if that because of love or habit, although they might just be the same thing.

Stan slaps my thigh companionably. “We’ve all got our shit.”

“Let’s go out,” I say.

“Out? You for real?”

His assessment has affronted me. Can I use affront as a verb? Fuck it. I have. But I wonder if I’m just that superficial in accepting somebody, and/or that delusional that I want some fairytale. With a couple of beers in me for idiot courage, I want to go out, talk to Rachel, and prove to myself that I can accept anybody as they are.

“I don’t know,” Stan says.

I don’t push it, knowing that once we’ve had a few more beers, he’ll reconsider it.

We cycle through music. Drink some more beer. Watch some more music. Talk about my writing much in the way we did the first time. Drink some more beer. And then, halfway through our sixth, he sits up.

“Let’s go,” he says.

“Out?”

“Yup.”

I order an Uber, and we end up at the same bar we were at the last time, and we cycle through random chat about Star Trek, that Stranger Things is overrated, then about life as teens and high school, and the friends we still see, before we move onto family, at which point I tell him about my mother dying.

“And you’re out?” he says, although it’s without condemnation.

I look at my left arm, my right arm, then at my chest. “Apparently,” I say.

“This why you wanted to drink?”

“I think I wanted to anyway, and this was just another reason.”

Stan toasts me with his beer. “To your mum.”

I clink his bottle with my own.

“You’re next, I guess.”

“What do you mean?”

“When my dad died, you know what I realised? Given the natural order of things, I’m next in line. Parents die. You move up in the queue. You die. Your kids move up – although we don’t have kids, obviously. Our lines end with us.”

“Probably not such a bad thing,” I say.

“Why’s that?”

“What do you think the purpose of life is?”

“To live,” Stan says immediately.

“That’s it?”

“Don’t say it like it’s nothing – you experience things. You ever gotten in a fight with two cops and been beaten down with a baton? Ever had a threesome with two gorgeous woman out of their minds on ecstasy? You ever swam so far out into the ocean at night, you can’t see the shore anymore, and you go from fearing you’re never getting back to accepting it?”

“I have not done any of those things.”

“You live inside your head too much.”

“You think?”

“When we were teens, you were like that, too – I mean, you were adventurous, you took risks, but you always pulled up before the line.”

“Usually because you were so far over it, somebody had to hang back to grab you.”

“And since?”

“I guess you get in that habit,” I say.

“If you could do anything, what would it be?”

I don’t know – dying and coming back is about as extreme as you can get, although strange it’s lacked the wonder of, say, seeing the pyramids, or the exhilaration of skydiving, or the sheer carnality as what Stan suggests and having a threesome, and so many other things. I wonder why that is.

“Time to bring you back from the dead,” Stan says.

“What?”

Stan laughs. “You’re a little down.” He claps me on the shoulder and grins. “Strippers?”