He made a face to tell me that he’d memorized Klaus Kertesz’s pickup lines. “Like,
Your life is too easy. You’ve been tricked into not questioning your soul. Do you know this?”
“And …?”
“Unless you change quickly, your soul will freeze itself into one shape forever, and never thaw. You must know this. Have you thought about it?”
“He sounds tame enough.”
“Liz—imagine you’re just an ordinary woman trying to go from the office to the market to the house, having to deal with this—” He refrained from saying “idiot,” but I could tell that Klaus Kertesz was blighting Rainer’s days.
“He’s a stalker, then.”
“No. A stalker stalks. Herr Kertesz keeps to his own routine, but if he bumps into one of the women on his list, he acts.”
“Is there any sort of ongoing type of woman he annoys?”
“They tend to be his own age, and also, women at first do not mind, as he’s tall and very good-looking.”
“Has he ever hassled men?”
“No. We’ve questioned him several times. He says that men are all damned, and that there is no use trying to save them. He says only women can be saved, and that’s why there are slightly more women born than men—so that we, as humans, have hope. He’s statistical about it.”
I asked, “But he’s never actually assaulted a woman?”
What about me?
“No. He’s a nuisance, but not an attacker. Or so we thought. But a month before I found you on Google, there was a woman here who became tired of Mr. Kertesz’s attentions. One night as she was walking home, Mr. Kertesz zoomed in to deliver his lecture. She performed some tae kwon do moves on him, and after this she filed a formal assault charge. This pleased me. We were glad because we finally had legal recourse. It was after our interview with him that he told us about you. I did not expect you to actually come here.”
“That was almost three decades ago. What could I possibly say or do now that would make any legal difference—or
any
difference?”
“Maybe nothing.”
“But here I am, right now, sitting in front of you.”
“Yes.”
“Rainer, I guess we could have had this small conversation on the phone.”
“Technically.”
“I need to think a minute.”
It was a relief to find out that Klaus wasn’t a rapist, but again, what happened to
me?
It was obvious Bayer wanted to give Kertesz enough rope to hang himself with, and if it got a rapist off the street, good. But how to digest the news that he was a religious—what? A religious …
streetwalker?
“Do any of these women ever stop and actually talk to him?”
“As I said, he’s a handsome man, and he shows interest.”
“But then what happens?”
“I think the women realize that they’re not being treated as individual women, but only as a part of Herr Kertesz’s sickness. Something about his banter—is that the word?—something about his banter makes them suspicious.”
“How can you know that?”
“When you meet him, you’ll see for yourself.”
What I expected to see was an older version of Jeremy, one who wasn’t sent to multiple rural British Columbian foster homes, who didn’t get MS and who didn’t have to put a brave face on the crappy hand life had dealt him. I said, “When we go back to your office, can you show me more of the photos you have of Klaus?”
“No, I can show them to you right now.”
From his leather attaché case he removed the vinyl photo album. He moved our mineral water glasses so that I could lay it flat on the table. I saw, laid out, maybe a dozen photos that showed Klaus over the past decade, aging well, the only noticeable change being the deepening creases in his brow and the creases running from the sides of his nose down to his jaw.
“Does he resemble your Jeremy?”
“Yes. He does. Almost entirely.”
“How do the photos make you feel?”
For the first time in my life I had the sensation that I was being analyzed, that something alien was tracking and monitoring my statements and behaviour, and assessing them on a scoresheet in categories I couldn’t imagine. How fitting that it be in Vienna.
“How does it make me
feel?
It makes me feel stupid, for not remembering this Kertesz guy in the first place. It makes me sad, because I miss Jeremy so goddamn much. But most of all—you know what?—it makes me hopeful, because now I can see where Jeremy really came from.”
“You’d still like to meet with Herr Kertesz, then?”
“More than ever.”
“You’re not afraid?”
“Me? No.”
“Perhaps not about physical assault, but about being …”
“Being what?”
Rainer shrugged. “Let down, perhaps?”
“How?”
“That maybe Herr Kertesz somehow makes smaller your memory of Jeremy.”
“No. I can’t believe that. Not until I meet the man.” Though I confess I was feeling as though I’d just released the genie from the bottle.
Rainer said to me, “And so you shall meet him.”
I said, “Good.”
At that moment the room flashed white and I almost passed out, hit suddenly with a blinding headache. After the headache’s first assault, I emerged into reality, dazed. Rainer was asking if I was okay. I looked in the mirror behind him and saw that I was chalk white. I’d never seen a body do that before, let alone mine.
“Liz, I’ll take you back to your hotel right now.”
“It’s nothing.”
“No, it’s probably MSG in the lunch.”
“You’re probably right.” But of course with me, after Frankfurt, a headache is no longer
just
a headache.
He taxied with me back to my hotel, where I slept until sunrise the next morning—today—this morning.
I’m scheduled to meet Klaus Kertesz at three this afternoon, in a room at the City Hall. I can only say that I’m glad to have had my pen and paper to chip away at the time between then and … thirty minutes from now.
Time to go.
* * *
In the cab to City Hall, my head felt like an oven that had been burning full tilt all day long, with no food inside being cooked. I was a mess.
Rainer met me at the front door and escorted me inside, where it was cool, across marble floors buffed by centuries of genteel shoe leather. We walked quickly to a room at the end of a long second-floor hallway. We stopped at a wooden door. The upper half was a rippled-glass window through which I could see a figure inside.
Rainer asked me, “You’re okay here?”
“Does he know it’s me?”
“No.”
“How did you convince him to come?”
“It was more his family. They want the noise around him to go away.”
I said I was ready, and I entered the room.
There, more or less, was Jeremy, but much older. He’d been looking out the window, and when he turned around to see me, he gave me Jeremy’s winning smile.
Klaus took one step toward me and said, “Well, good heavens. Queen Elizabeth. Hello.”
* * *
Just so it doesn’t look like I’m building toward a fireworks climax here, I’ll flatly say that Jeremy died on the morning of December
23
—after just four months of living with me. I was in the bathroom counting his pills, and when I came out I found that his body had just sort of … stopped. His last words were a small joke, about an hour earlier:
This mattress is both comfortable and affordably priced.
There. I feel better having gotten that out of the way. His death came far more quickly than anyone had anticipated, but MS is a crapshoot.
Just so nobody forgets, here’s a list of some of Jeremy’s symptoms:
numbness
pins and needles
blurred vision
inability to walk
inability to tolerate heat
muscle spasms
swallowing problems
loss of sensation
loss of bladder and bowel control
dementia
Most people with MS have a plausibly normal life and can manage through the years okay. Jeremy was “primary progressive.” Primary progressives take a gut-kneading high-speed ride that can’t, won’t and is unable to stop once it begins. His final diet was mostly pills and IVs: prednisone, Betaseron and glatiramer acetate. Mostly the meds made him nauseous or confused, but every so often they triggered a good evening’s conversation. On the plus side, Jeremy never had mood swings or bouts of apathy, common in the late stages of MS. I was grateful for that. His humour and charm never once vanished.
It was those damned nodules of dead proteins in his brain, like raisins in raisin bread, that stripped Jeremy of the motions and tics and gestures that make us alive. I have to remind myself of the medical view, because I could see no message from God there—no mercy, no higher logic or moral sense to describe the sight of him on my couch, as fall merged into winter, as Hale-Bopp came and went, and as, near the end of November, he finally lost his winning smile.
I was giving him a haircut one afternoon. He looked at me and said, “Mom, come on, it has to be showing. I’m trying here.”
“Sorry, honey.”
“Crap. That smile was going to coast me right through my golden years.”
By December, Jeremy had lost so many of his Jeremy-isms that the loss of the winning smile seemed, to him, anti-climactic. To me it was hard, as it was his winning smile that had carried me over to his side of the universe. Remember, this is a man who had me crawling down a highway in rush hour on the first day we met.
Dr. Tyson came every few days, powerless to do much except watch and prescribe more pills. She went beyond the call of duty and taught me about practical issues like drips, tubes and wheelchairs. I pride myself that I was competent in that respect.
William was good for a visit every few days, and when he came he brought snippets gleaned from the medical underground—yes, a medical underground exists—and these snippets provided us with dim glimmers of hope. It’s amazing how far you can go along bartering with a disease.
If we could just fly to Baltimore to try this new antibody
therapy, all our problems would be solved!
Denial was easy; bargaining was the toughie. Stem cells now offer genuine hope, but as recently as seven years ago—zip. Mother and Leslie did their part too, which was simply to visit.
I also kept on hand the best medicine of all: volumes of literature on farming, which Jeremy enjoyed reading or having read to him. When he was too prostrate to do anything much, I read aloud the dos and don’ts of allowing alfalfa fields to go fallow, the proper procedures for piglets who won’t suckle, or the advantages of renting a light plane and viewing your land from above. Along the windows we had a small farm of runner beans and radishes growing in a variety of Styrofoam containers. If I ever go on a quiz show and the topic is farming, just watch me win that minivan with the built-in Warner Brothers TV package.
* * *
Okay, I see what I’m doing here—I’m using medicine and science to deflect attention away from what it was that made my son himself and different in a big way: his visions—his, oh
God
—I don’t care what you call them at this point. Whatever it was, Jeremy
saw
something uncanny. Period.
One afternoon I was reading a magazine and he said, “Can you see them?”
I said, “What?”
“The air in front of us. It’s filled with metal tubes.”
“Tubes?”
“Like for road drainage. They’re floating around in front of us—and now they’re entering my body. I have holes going through my body. Tunnels.” He was looking at the ceiling as he said this.
I wrote down his words as he spoke. “What else do you see?”
“I’m looking down at the ground, but I’m not casting a shadow. Instead of my shadow there’s light.”
“And?”
“I’ve walked into a dark room. There’s a planet in front of me now. Earth. It’s maybe your height. It’s glowing like the old
NASA
footage—in the middle of the room. Floating.”
“What’s it doing?”
“Nothing. Hovering. If I went up to it and blew, I could cause a hurricane anywhere I wanted. I just touched Antarctica. It’s cold. And now I’m looking at my fingers.”
“Go on.”
“The earth is so bright. My hands are glowing bright red from the blood inside them.”
“Okay.”
Jeremy went quiet for awhile.
“Anything else?” I asked.
“No. Nothing.”
“Keep trying.”
After a few seconds he said, “I’m never going to know you properly, Mom. You know that.”
“I do.”
“I should have contacted you years earlier.”
“Nonsense.”
“I’m not going to be seeing any more pictures in my head.” I was about to protest, but he said, “Mom,
no.
It’s over. You’re the one who has to do it now.”
“I can’t.”
“No. If I can inherit something as stupid as being able to sing backwards from you, you can certainly see a few pictures in your head.”
It was late afternoon, a weekday, and I breathed in a few times and closed my eyes, at which point Jeremy said, “Try to find the farmers.”
And so I tried.
What do any of us see when we close our eyes? Nothing and everything. I’ve often wondered what sort of dreams people have who are born blind. Do they dream in sound and temperature? Has anybody ever documented this?
For obvious reasons, I’ve thought about “seeing things” a great deal since then. For starters, I think humans are the only animal to know the difference between sleeping and dreaming. It doesn’t matter if you’re a lion cub, a jellyfish or a fern—wakefulness and dreaming are the same thing to them all. I think that until recently, maybe a few thousand years ago, that was the case for humans too. But then there was somebody out there who broke the cycle, who told people the difference between the two worlds. And so, for a few centuries, people became used to thinking of real life and dreaming as two different places. And it was someone like Jeremy who did the telling.
But then something else happened. While we knew about dream life versus real life, we still didn’t know about the past, present or future. A day was a day was a day.