Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman Page 0,17

He got some ice from the fridge, downed a bottle of Scotch, climbed into the tub, and slit his wrists. His mother found the body two days later. The police came and took a lot of photographs. Blood had dyed the bath the color of tomato juice. The police ruled it a suicide. After all, the doors had been locked and, of course, the deceased had bought the knife himself. But why did he buy two cans of shaving cream that he didn’t plan to use? No one knew.

Maybe it hadn’t hit him when he was at the department store that in a couple of hours he’d be dead. Or maybe he was afraid that the cashier would guess that he was going to kill himself.

He didn’t leave a will or a farewell note. On the kitchen table there was only a glass, the empty whiskey bottle and ice bowl, and the two cans of shaving cream. While he was waiting for the bath to fill, knocking back glass after glass of Haig on the rocks, he must have stared at those cans and thought something along the lines of I’ll never have to shave again.

A man’s death at twenty-eight is as sad as the winter rain.

During the next twelve months, four more people died.

One died in March in an incident at an oil field in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, and two died in June—a heart attack and a traffic accident. From July to November peace reigned, but then in December another friend died, also in a car crash.

Unlike my first friend, who’d killed himself, these friends never had the time to realize that they were dying. For them it was like climbing up a staircase they’d climbed a million times before and suddenly finding a step missing.

“Would you make up the bed for me?” the friend who died of a heart attack had asked his wife. He was a furniture designer. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. He’d woken up at nine, worked for a while in his room, and then said he felt sleepy. He went to the kitchen, made some coffee, and drank it. But the coffee didn’t help. “I think I’ll take a nap,” he said. “I hear a buzzing sound in the back of my head.” Those were his last words. He curled up in bed, went to sleep, and never woke up again.

The friend who died in December was the youngest, and the only woman. She was twenty-four, like a revolutionary or a rock star. One cold rainy night just before Christmas, she was flattened in the tragic yet quite ordinary space between a beer-delivery truck and a concrete telephone pole.

A few days after the last funeral, I went to my friend’s apartment to return the suit, which I’d picked up from the dry cleaner’s, and to give him a bottle of whiskey to thank him.

“Much obliged. I really appreciate it,” I said.

As usual, his fridge was full of cold beer, and his comfortable sofa reflected a faint ray of sunlight. On the coffee table there was a clean ashtray and a pot of Christmas poinsettias.

He took the suit, in its plastic covering, from me, his movements leisurely—like those of a bear just coming out of hibernation—and quietly put it away.

“I hope the suit doesn’t smell like a funeral,” I said.

“Clothes aren’t important. The real problem is what’s inside them.”

“Um,” I murmured.

“One funeral after another for you this year,” he said, stretching out on the sofa and pouring beer into a glass. “How many altogether?”

“Five,” I said, spreading out the fingers of my left hand. “But I think that’s got to be it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Enough people have died.”

“It’s like the Curse of the Pyramids or something,” he said. “I remember reading that somewhere. The curse continues until enough people have died. Or else a red star appears in the sky and the moon’s shadow covers the sun.”

After we finished a six-pack, we started on the whiskey. The winter sunlight sloped gently into the room.

“You look a little glum these days,” he said.

“You think so?” I said.

“You must be thinking about things too much in the middle of the night,” he said. “I’ve stopped thinking about things at night.”

“How’d you manage that?”

“When I get depressed, I start to clean. Even if it’s two or three in the morning. I wash the dishes, wipe off the stove, mop the floor, bleach the dish towels, organize my desk drawers, iron every shirt in sight,” he said,