Death and the Maiden

If the metro made Pat especially misanthropic, it was primarily because of what she did and didn’t overhear there. On the street people rubbed the odd spark off one another in passing or blathered the occasional bit of nonsense or near-nonsense to one another over alcohol— but sitting and standing on metro trains they were looking at their smartphones, having conversations whose interlocutors would, in a transcript, have been impossible to tell apart, or, at best, looking into space. They weren’t even interested-and-so-interesting enough to steal glances at one another (you could forget about ogling!), or to look out the window when the train was going overground. Indeed, the conversations they had were, in most cases, part and parcel of this ‘not looking’. Old-style small-talk still occurred, of course — but it was rapidly losing ground to a mode of communication which made ‘polite meaningless words’ seem as quaintly desirable as, say, listening to an album all the way through or knowing the names of the six or seven species of bird you came across regularly.

‘Serial me-ing’ she called this increasingly preponderant way of conversing. Although it could be taken to different levels and in various directions, all it essentially consisted of was two or more people saying ‘I’m here’ by turns. A group of university students, for example, would be caught (by Pat) taking turns as follows:

. . .“I got a 5 but I didn’t study.”

“I persuaded the teacher to give me a 10 so as to keep my average up.”

“None of my teachers would do that.”

“I’ve got a resit tomorrow”. . .

Or two 40-somethings, we-ing rather than me-ing by virtue of their respective joint bank accounts, would be tuned in on as they ‘dirtied the airwaves’ with the likes of:

. . .“We’re going on a Baltic cruise.”

“That’s nice. We’re going to Berlin.”

“Oh, we went to Berlin 2 years ago. You’ll love it. But I told you about it, didn’t I? Anyway, next year we’ve decided we’re finally going to Argentina.”

“Lucky you. We’ve always wanted to go there”. . .

So boring were they, these ‘conversations,’ that after about 10 seconds of listening to one of them, she was anaesthetised to the point where not even the compensatory pleasure of feeling superior was available to her.

When Pat was on the metro she a) always stood — even when the carriage was empty — and b) did one of five things: either she listened in (and regretted it); or she looked for — and occasionally found — more or less interesting-seeming people within eyeshot; or she looked out the window (or at her own reflection); or, having called them all a bunch of letzten Menschen, she proceeded to toy with them, looking, for example, at the trainers they were wearing (she always wore boots) and anywhere between gleefully and wearily staging a little three-way quantic snail race, which she kept going (and sometimes even propelled to a finish) by three-handedly counting them forward as now Nike, now Adidas, and now Other; or — as she was doing at that moment, on the morning of the day she would die of a brain haemorrhage — she moved so deeply in thought that if she never missed her station, it must have been by virtue of some sort of  ‘waking-just-before-the-alarm-goes-off’ mechanism or, why not, psychism.

The thought or thought-system she was moving in right now — a moment before somebody said her name and made her come to with a start — was that of her money problems and what miracles might get her out of them. If one of the miracles considered was death — and death, moreover, not by suicide but by precisely the kind of major biological blow-out which would, in fact, put an end to her that very same day — then there was nothing prescient, coincidental, or even surprising about this. Pat not only thought about death often but enjoyed doing so, thinking-about-death being, for her, akin (she imagined) to what thinking-about-retirement was for the death-blind letzte Mensch.

But at the moment when somebody said her name (as if from within the body of her thoughts), Pat had moved out of the valley of death and into the far less agreeable, indeed, wholly disagreeable brown-and-beige-Möbius-strip-like series of interiors of having to live (possibly) with her parents. Thus, despite its making her jump, this interruption was as agreeable to Pat as, say, finding ten or, rather, five or, anyway, two euros under the bed would have been.

Pat looked up and to her right — and saw Elly standing there holding one of the floor-to-roof steel bars as if it were a staff of power or something. Good old Elly! She was, needless to say, as gently-smiling, frailly beautiful, and doe-eyed as ever. Only, on this occasion, with that staff of power preternaturalising her frailty and with those letzten Menschen contrasting her spirituality, she evinced something which for Pat was new: a sort of shining elfinness — one that made a supra-Elly of her. 

‘Hello Elly,’ said Pat beaming pleasure at her. ‘What are you doing here? Visiting your sisters?’

‘I’m back living here now,’ she said with that slow liquid contralto of hers. ‘I have been for about six months. What about you? Are you still single-handedly making a Bohemia of Paterna?’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah’ said Pat not wanting to talk about it. ‘Or in a word: yeah. But so, anyway, what, you’ve been transferred to a hospital here, have you?’

‘No, I still work in Requena. I spend two hours a day driving there and back. But it was time for Juan and me to finally start cohabiting. We’ve been together for twelve years now.’

‘I’m glad you’re taking things so slowly. At that rate you’ll die at a ripe old age without having got far enough down the line to see the essential horror of human existence.’

‘I’d like to think so,’ said Elly in a way which, despite her smile, seemed to indicate that that was indeed her intention.

‘And you’re still A-&-E-ing it up there, are you? Or have they put you out to pasture at a health centre?’

‘No, I’m not burnt-out yet,’ laughed Elly. ‘In fact, I might even be becoming fireproof.’

‘And how many die on you a week?’ Pat wanted to know with an impetus that easily got her, post-utterance, beyond a couple of disapproving comments and some looking askance which she heard and glimpsed coming from the letzten Menschen.

‘About three on average,’ laughed Elly, God bless her (although, of course, she can afford to laugh at my flippancy, thought Pat — because it isn’t her doing).

‘And how’s your relationship with death going? Are you traumatised and taking something, positively revelling in it, or have you become callous?’

‘The third,’ she limited herself to answering — although, being Elly, she’d laughed again, and was even now continuing to bathe Pat in smiling, doe-eyed good will.

But Pat had picked up more than a couple of comments from ‘the audience’ that time, and, irritated-going-on-pissed-off all of a sudden, she rapidly told Elly, ‘Yeah, you said about becoming fireproof,’ then turned her head and gaze to the left — and immediately encountered the trouble she was after: a pair of 50-something-year-old female eyes looking daggers at her. Pat’s first reaction was to look away — but then, given a shove back into the ring by her own irritation, and having, she hoped, succeeded in turning that initial movement towards flight into what appeared a flurry of blinks, she went on to do what, as she did it, converted her mounting anger into a loud, more-than-a-little maniacal internal laugh: staring straight back at the woman’s daggers, she opened her own eyes as wide (literally) as she could and..... made the woman look away.

The woman, it’s true, let off a Parthian ‘Lunatic’ as she came scrambling down off her redoubt — but Pat simply took that as the compliment it undoubtedly essentially was.

For a moment, she was very much ready for the next one — very much tempted, that was, to look further left and so take on the next ‘fucker.’ But then an absurd vision of it actually coming to blows interceded (since, whatever else happened, she wasn’t going to descend to arguing with them), and seeing herself knocking them around and down with the martial arts skills she in no way possessed, she turned back to Elly with such a broad smile on her face that the corners of Elly’s mirror smile seemed to go up past the tip of her nose.

‘Well,’ said Pat. ‘We’ve only got a couple of stations left. So you’d better hurry up and tell me first about your family and then about the mad dogs and comatose cats which, your family being your family, are almost certainly lying somewhere within its folds.’

As she strode uphill from the station to her brother’s flat, Pat was giving herself what, friendliness of tone notwithstanding, amounted to a talking to.

It’s not as if I’m the Grim Reaper’s next door neighbour, whom he regularly borrows sugar from, she was telling herself as part of a ‘necessary’, self-prescribed coming-back-down-to-earth process after her ‘exploit’ on the metro. Yes, she thought, they’re death-blind, but— 

But what? she demanded suddenly, unable to take ‘this shit’ even from herself. They fucking started it!

And she would undoubtedly have been punished for her ‘heroic victory’ qua hubris with a nice little, tight little anxiety-generating circle of Hell on earth if, just then, a big ginger tom hadn’t appeared. 

He was sauntering down the middle of the street, holding his tail up as though the slight effort that required had been the essence of play and so art. Having become inwardly silent at the sight of him, Pat nodded him a wordless hello. He, for his part, not only regarded her face toward face, but continued to do so. Thus, turning his head as they drew closer and closer to the line beyond which — she on the pavement and he in the middle of the road — they’d walk and saunter into one another’s pasts, he gave her back far more than she’d given him.

Sufficient happiness, she would, perhaps, have called what he gave her if she hadn’t still been mute inside at the moment when she felt it most.

Only, when she and he had, in fact, already crossed said ‘line’, and Pat, picturing the intercom panel to herself, was beginning (with reemergent language) to try to pre-work-out which of the innumerable unmarked buzzers her brother’s was, she suddenly decided to look back over her shoulder — in order to see what the ginger tom was doing now.

What he was doing was two things: sauntering down the middle of the street and looking over his shoulder at Pat.