Wrecked (17 page)

Out of love, I go with her, down, down, out of life. Into darkness. I hope it happens during the daytime, when others are around. I shudder at the thought of the gaps in her comprehension closing and her realizing three of her children are dead. I suspect I’ll need help. I’m not going to get through all of this alone. Why does she get medication while I don’t? I’d love to be medicated into peacefulness. I need to find a therapist. I’m falling apart. And now I’m going to spend weeks and weeks looking after my suicidal mother. I’m out of luck. She’s suffered the greater sorrow. Out of all of us. I just lost my brothers. Which is worse? Losing your children, of course. And the men have each lost only one son. Which is worse? Losing three children. None of us were there, either. Which is worse? Being there. So we’ll focus our efforts entirely on the mother who has lost three children. Nobody can complain about that. It’s also why we won’t get any drugs. Simple as that.

I don’t want to talk about the whole thing with my boyfriend or the three assembled fathers. Or with my own father. I want to talk to a professional. Somebody who has studied the shit I’m going to have to get through. Somebody who can help me deal with it. So that I come out of it a tolerable human being. So that I survive it. With these thoughts in my head and my purposeful gait, I reach home in record time. The place
where I live with my boyfriend is nearby. Thank God I don’t have to go to my mother’s house. Three kids’ rooms are empty there now. Forever. That’s where all the relatives who are coming from England will have to sleep. All the people coming to support us. Now, to support my mother, not us! It’s like the wedding, only the other way around. We were all there, for a happy occasion. Now all of them are here, for a tragic occasion. Wedding, funeral.

My mother will probably leave the rooms exactly as my brothers left them. The way they always do in the movies. Then my mother will sit around on one of their beds each day, hold a baseball bat in her hands, and cry. Except that none of my brothers played baseball. The whole family is against all things American. We’re anti-American. We’re against war, the death penalty, obesity, Monsanto, Exxon. In our family, America represents only bad. Yeah, yeah, all the things that go through your head. A wedding and three funerals. And I’m right in the middle of it. I cannot fucking believe it.

I run into our apartment and pack the essentials. My body is working surprisingly well given all that’s happened. It is acting as if things will go on as usual. I’m functioning; my body is doing things and following orders. Well, yes, though not much more than that. My brain is trailing way behind—it’s still somewhere in England. Or is it still in Belgium, on the autobahn?

I think back over all I know about the accident, going over it all until I feel sick. Until I feel almost as if I was there but was unable to do anything. I couldn’t help. My little brothers! Nobody saved them. I just watch the images in my head and imagine with horror what it must be like to be burned alive because you haven’t been pulled to safety. Because people drive
past or exit the autobahn to avoid being caught in a traffic jam. Because they don’t want to be late to some unimportant appointment. For that they leave children to die in tin cans filling with flames.

Who knows? Maybe if more people had helped, they could have been pulled out of the car. Dead or alive.

At least then we would have had bodies for the funeral. What are we going to bury now? I hadn’t thought about it up to this point. I envy everyone who loses someone and has a dead body to touch. To better understand. So the crippled brain can understand the person is dead. Life will not return to this lifeless corpse. Never. Look at it, touch it. The body is stiff and yellowing and as cold to the touch as a dead chicken from the freezer. I’d love to have that. Having to say good-bye without a body is playing tricks on my brain. I don’t want to accept the inevitable and instead try to fool myself into believing that if no bodies have been found, it’s still possible they are alive. Maybe they saved themselves. Got out of the car before the big explosion and ran into the woods. Who knows? It’s possible! Rhea managed to open the door and crawl out. Maybe they did, too, before my mother was taken out.

They are living in the forest in Belgium, with all the animals that have yet to be brutally run over by the car owners of ever-advancing economic growth. The accident took a lot out of them, of course, and they’ve been crazy since; they can’t remember anything about the accident or their life before it. My oldest brother is the leader and looks out for the littler ones. For the child who had been sitting behind my mother—I don’t know which one it was—the big brother cobbled together something out of leaves and branches for him to wear during the day since his skull was
fractured by the impact with my mother’s seat back and her hard backbone. But it slowly grows back together thanks to my brother’s serviceable headgear. The little brother frequently has bad headaches as a result, though. The three of them figure out that if he chews the bark of a certain tree, however, it relieves the pain. They eat berries and sprouts, like the Indians, living in harmony with nature. They are naked and dirty and have long hair. Since the accident they’ve all lost their voices and communicate with looks. They understand one another perfectly, though—they are survivors. What else do they need to communicate? They’ve leaned a long tree limb against the trunk of a tree and then collected hundreds of smaller limbs and leaned them against the limb to create a big lean-to, where they sleep. They cover the lean-to with soft moss and leaves so it’s watertight and warm in their shelter. They pad the floor with dried moss. And they have everything they need to live. They drink from a little brook that runs through the woods. They gather berries of a certain type. One of them tries a few while the others watch to see whether the tester’s face changes color or his skin or pupils show a reaction. If he gets sick they know that type of berry is poisonous for people, and they help him throw up with the aid of a stick they find in the woods and use just for this purpose.

When, using this method, they find berries that are edible in each season, they collect far more of them than they can eat and dry them in their lean-to for the winter. One of them must stay with the berries because the birds and squirrels are direct competitors for the same food. Whenever my brothers fail to be vigilant, their food stores are pilfered. The animals of the forest are smart enough to realize it takes less energy to steal than to gather their own.

They’ve set up a monetary system between the three of them. If one of them finds something interesting and another wants to buy it, they need something to exchange. So they came up with their own currency. I’m sure the idea came from my money-crazy oldest brother. They creep out near the autobahn at night and collect shards of broken glass from bottles thrown there by people in cars. Their favorite is blue glass. Blue shards are the most valuable in the country where they live. Next come green shards, then brown, and the least valuable shards are clear. They polish the jagged edges down using rocks so that the pieces can be held comfortably in the hand. The noise made by rubbing the glass against stone is almost unbearable, and they laugh uneasily about it and hum loudly; they don’t know the name of it, but the song they are humming is “Lucky Man,” by the Verve.

With the rounded shards of glass they pay one another and hoard their treasures. That’s how they live, day in and day out. Life is a bit more trying in winter, but they prepare for it. The skull of the one who was behind Mother—why don’t I know who it was? This piece of information is missing from my mosaic. I can’t ask anyone else who was there. I’ve cut off contact with the two survivors, Mother and Rhea. In any event, the skull heals slightly askew. My brother can feel the bump of bone through his long, dirty, matted hair. But he’s happy that the headaches stopped after a few years.

Yep, that’s the way it is in the Belgian forest. And nobody can prove otherwise. Because nobody can show me the dead bodies. Because there is nothing left for the funeral.

Or is there no funeral when there’s nothing left after a flaming inferno? Really, we’ve already conducted the cremation—there
on the autobahn. We’ve just done without the crematorium. And nobody collected the ashes. Right? Did they just blow away? Where? Or did the ash stick to the tires of a car driving past or to corpses—in open wounds? In the hair of the firemen? Did they wash my brothers down the drain with men’s shampoo after they finished putting out the burning cars? Were the ashes swept up when the sanitation workers cleared the accident site? Just before they reopened the road? Together with the glittering shards of shattered windshields, scattered pieces of clothing, bandages, and medical tape, panels of cars, forgotten stuffed animals and kids’ toys? Everything in a big pile in the emergency lane. And then the carefree drive continued for those stuck in traffic during the cleanup.

Since the accident, I’m the only one who drives. That is, I never let myself be driven by anyone else. I feel as if everyone else drives worse than I do. I haven’t become a nervous driver since then. Not frightened or tense. Just very careful. I drive defensively, always on the lookout. I try to anticipate all the craziness of other drivers. It’s up to me to get everyone in my car safely to their destination. A task my mother was unable to accomplish. It’s my duty. If I am a passenger, I can’t take it for long. Every time we go on vacation, I drive the entire way, regardless of how many hours the trip takes. And anyone who doesn’t like it can’t come with me. I convince myself that I pay more attention than anyone else because I know just how quickly things can happen.

I count all the dead animals along the road. They are like my brothers: innocent little creatures. Anyone who drives is potentially complicit in the deaths of other people. Since the
accident, I notice all the signs of other accidents. I’m haunted by accidents. Not just ours, but all of the accidents I see evidence of. The places along the autobahn where the police have sprayed paint to mark the scene of an accident, the scrapes and dents on people’s bumpers, the long skid marks on the asphalt. I see it all and try to imagine who died and whether someone left children behind—which makes it worse. The rules of life must not be broken. And one of them is that parents die before their children. That is the correct order. And everyone should die a natural death. Meaning they should fall asleep and their heart should just stop beating—once they’ve reached an advanced age. For me, cancer at an old age is okay as well. Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s—hey, we all have to die of something. That’s just the way it is. But children should not die before their parents, and definitely not in a car accident, car catastrophe. Ripped from life. Without any good-bye. That is brutal. On an ordinary trip on the autobahn I usually count about four dead barn owls, two hawks, one fox, and two cats. I don’t really care about domestic animals. They belong to someone. They get fed. They are not stand-ins for my brothers. But the wild animals pull at my heartstrings when I see them lying there dead. They are proof to me that driving is wrong. That the whole thing is wrong. The fact that we’ve built autobahns through the forest in order to get to places faster strikes me as a huge mistake. The animals were there first. They run around in the woods and don’t know how to get across the street alive. Six lanes of cars racing by. Some of them going more than 200 kilometers per hour. I always hope that they will wrap themselves around the support beam of an overpass—without hurting anyone else—before they gash a huge hole in some family because they are so damn important
and in such a hurry. Speed kills. People and animals. Though I care less and less about people. Most of them deserve the worst. I feel sorry for the animals. They haven’t evolved to the point where they understand that some cars drive too fast. Sometimes I’d rather die than live among these people- and animal-killing speed demons. A momentary lapse of concentration, a slight oversight, and
boom
, it’s too late—a catastrophe that destroys an entire family. I hurriedly march back to my wounded mother in the hospital. I have a duty: to take care of her.

I arrive at my mother’s hospital room totally out of breath. Maybe I overdid it a little, walking so fast in the bright summer sun. But since that day, I stay in constant motion. Sitting around hurts. Having time to reflect hurts. Staying on the run makes things bearable. Later on, when I go to yoga classes, I love doing all the poses and getting my heart beating until I am more body than mind—that feels good. But when you’re supposed to relax at the end of class, I get up and leave instead. The instructor can’t expect that of me—to lie there as if nothing bad ever happened. It’s always the accident. It still follows me eight years on, and even now I cannot tolerate moments of peace and quiet because the images of my brothers flood back into my mind, images of the hellish pain they must have endured before they died. Then comes the unbearable guilt about the fact that I am alive and they are not.

Mother is sleeping. I sit down on the bed in which I will spend the next few weeks sleeping. Like an old woman I hold my handbag in my lap. I hide behind the bag. I’m afraid of my mother; I’m afraid of my dead brothers; I’m afraid of feeling guilty for being alive.

When I fall in love with something, I feel bad that they no longer can. When I celebrate some success at work, I’m consumed by guilt. They had their entire lives ahead of them and would certainly have enjoyed many successes and had a lot to celebrate. But they never will. While I can. And that suffocates me. If I make a lot of money I can celebrate it only halfheartedly. My brother, the oldest, the one closest to me in age, loved money. He always missed his rich father—whom my mother, as always, left for the next man, for whatever reason. My brother loved money—as I did—because for us it represented our father.

My most vivid memory of my oldest brother is when he and my mother went to the bank to withdraw a sum of money my mother needed to buy a used car. She wanted to buy the car in cash. My brother begged my mother to let him take the money out of the envelope. Five thousand marks. Smiling, she let him. He spread the bills into a fan in his hand and fanned himself. He insisted that my mother take a picture of him. And he hung a print of that photo above his bed. Standing there with a massive amount of money in his hands with a wide grin on his face. We gave him a hard time about that picture. But he never backed down about his love for money. He was Mr. Bling in our family. Though I’m probably just as obsessed with money as he was, I can hide it better. Which is probably why I gave him a hard time about it. Because it was something about myself I didn’t think was good. It’s looked down upon in our society to be obsessed with money. Despite the fact that the entire fucking system is built on it.