Wrecked (18 page)

When we were allowed to see our father and he took us out to a restaurant—something that seemed ridiculously extravagant to us at the time—my brother, my dead brother,
would make a scene until he was permitted to see the bill at the end of the meal. My father tried in vain to teach him that it was bad manners to want to know how much the bill was when somebody else was paying. But my brother never gave in. For him, it was important that my father had a lot of purchasing power. He always looked at the bill, and from the sound he made you could tell he thought the sum was sky-high. Then, once appeased, he would look at our father with wonder in his eyes. I always rolled my eyes and acted as if I thought the whole thing was embarrassing. But looking back now, I’m sure I would have demanded to see the bill, too, if he hadn’t done it for me.

Sitting on the bed, I feel as if I’m in prison. I get short of breath. It’s all too much. These fits of short breathing have followed me since the day of the accident, too. The accident is the defining moment of my life. I describe all the minute details of that day to everyone I’ve gotten to know since then—everyone who has come to mean anything to me, that is. That way everybody knows how significant the accident is to me, my life, my psyche, my character, my fears, my worries.

A nurse enters the room. She puts a cup with a pill in it on the nightstand next to my mother’s bed and whispers to me that she needs to take it to make the transition to general anesthesia easier. Okay, I’ll see to it. She’s about to be taken to have her leg wounds brushed. Right, that’s what they call it here. Some kind of euphemism. What the doctor described to me earlier this afternoon—ripping off the healing scabs to avoid the formation of scar neoplasms or whatever they are.

All the things you have to deal with when you’ve barely flown the nest.

I sit there and stare at my mother, waiting for her to open her eyes. A new fear starts to well up in me. All of a sudden I notice the IV tube in her hand—there’s a cannula attached to the back of her hand. I see the fluid dripping slowly, but there are also air bubbles in the tube. They’re going into her vein. Obviously. Otherwise the fluid wouldn’t serve any purpose. But can’t you die from getting air in your veins or in your blood? Isn’t it a method of killing someone you see all the time on TV shows—a way to murder someone without getting caught? I ask the nurse as she’s walking out whether it’s dangerous for air to be going into her vein. My mother’s not a balloon. The nurse laughs and says you’d need a meter of air uninterrupted to cause problems. I thank her, though I bet there’s a meter of air in there already, even if it is broken up. I’m going to keep an eye on it. I’m not going to let my mother die now from some screwup in the hospital. I’m going to have to watch everything like a hawk.

The nurse’s laugh wakes up my mother. I stand up, put my bag on my bed, and go over to her. I hold out the cup with the pill in it and explain that she needs to take it before she is put under. They’re about to do the thing with her feet. She starts jabbering about how they shouldn’t mess around with it, they should leave the bandages alone. I tell her with my usual directness that they can’t leave it alone. That otherwise the dressing will be stuck to her feet. That it has to be refreshed every two days. And that the scabs have to be rubbed off. It sounds awful, but she has to get through it. Our roles have reversed. I speak to her as if she were a child and I were the mother.

She listens to her daughter-mother. She pops the pill into her mouth and looks up at the ceiling. She has changed so much. Unbelievable. I can hardly believe it’s even her. Did my old mother get burned up in the car with my brothers, perhaps? Did she go with them somehow? Is it possible? Has she lost part of herself? Or is it just the drugs? We will see. Time will tell. The nurse comes in again and pushes my mother out of the room on her bed. She bumps into the door frame. It annoys me. “Please be careful, okay?” She pushes the bed the rest of the way out. Treat my child properly!

I’m alone. I hate being alone. I walk around the hospital looking for my relatives. More and more are arriving by the hour. Soon the entire family will be here. Just three brothers missing. Otherwise we could get married right here. They tell me they’ve ordered pizza for us and that they want to eat in Mother’s room. And they have plastic bags filled with cans of beer. From the gas station on the corner. Nice. Finally, anesthesia for me. We dance on the graves of my brothers with pizza and beer. Food, finally. I’m hungry. Yes. I notice now how hungry I am. I guess I am still here—at least I feel the sensation of hunger. The relatives sit on my bed and on the floor. It’s fun to be with all of them. Because we’re all together, which is rare, and today was supposed to be the day of the wedding, it almost seems like the wedding reception. Just a little change of plans: it’s in a hospital. As if there was a minor hiccup and we had the wedding here in the hospital as a result. We laugh and sing. We are like chickens whose heads have been chopped off, running around for a last few minutes before the news of the accident sinks in.

The accident finally put my family over the edge. The family was already screwed up, wrecked, probably beyond repair,
but the accident was its death knell. Nobody kept in touch with anybody else afterward. That’s the way psychology is. Crazy.

When Mother returns, we’re already tipsy from all the beer. She is still asleep at first, but as she slowly wakes up and the anesthesia wears off, the fun is quickly over. She has horrible pain. She screams and shakes, says she’s unbearably cold. We all scramble around and manage to get four additional blankets. But it doesn’t help. She’s cold inside. There’s nothing we can do on the outside. She says the same sentence over and over again: “My feet, my feet, they need to leave them alone!” This is what the doctor meant. There are some types of pain you can’t entirely control with drugs. And she’s going to have to bear that type of pain every two days for who knows how long. I think she’s going to go crazy. And I am, too. I’m just like her. We are the same. Your pain is my pain. Mother. I have to take care of you. Take care of you. Maybe I’ll just let myself be totally absorbed by you. I don’t want to be myself anymore anyway. I don’t want to be just myself. I want to merge into you, be absorbed into you. Maybe that way it will hurt less for both of us.

After an hour of anguished screaming that feels like an eternity, she finally quiets down again. She falls asleep out of exhaustion. The relatives have lost their buzz amid all the horror and have to drink themselves back into a haze.

The day slowly comes to an end. The first day of a new life. A life full of fear and guilt. A new life informed by the irrefutable fact that death will soon come to take us all. Every last one of us. And that sheer luck is the only thing that allows you to cheat death for a while and survive. But do I even want to survive? Life is an ordeal. And it hangs precariously from a fine silk thread. Above, a silkworm clings to the ceiling; hanging
several meters below am I, wrapped in the thread coming out of the worm’s ass. That’s the way life looks to me since the accident. For eight years now. And I’ve aged at least thirty years in those eight.

The relatives head for the house, where there are now three empty rooms, and, knowing them, drink the rest of the night away. They leave me with this thing that used to be my mother, alone for the night in the hospital. It’s like a horror movie. We’re preprogrammed to think of things that way because of my mother’s obsession with movies.

For a long time I can’t fall asleep because I’m thinking about what I will do if she realizes what’s happened while I am alone with her. I can imagine that she will pull me down into the abyss with her, that she will go crazy and grab hold of me, and that I will sink into the same madness as hers. The ticking time bomb called Mother. I must have fallen asleep at some point, because I am awoken the next morning by my boyfriend.

The moment the accident happened, our love was finished. No couple can withstand something like that. On the way to their own wedding.

He has a copy of the local tabloid in his hand. Has he lost his mind? We are upstanding people with morals! For the most part, anyway. And when it comes to newspapers, always. He seems distraught and motions for me to join him out in the hallway. The mother creature is still asleep. I swing out of bed and walk out with him still in my pajamas. It’s clear that it’s something to do with the accident. Obviously. What else? I brace myself. But for this, there is no way to prepare yourself.

He hands me the paper, open to a particular page. The pigs have somehow gotten ahold of a photo of the accident site and printed it across an entire half page. I stare at the burned-out car. The contorted steel frame in which my brothers died. I never wanted to see that. But in that second it is burned into my brain forever, thanks to the paper. I don’t blame my boyfriend. I need to know what everyone else is seeing. The scene of the crime, photographed for public consumption. What’s newsworthy about this image? To me, this is grave robbing. They have stolen something from our family—private thoughts, private images. What the burned-out car they died in looked like is nobody’s concern. Nobody’s. It’s of concern only to the police and, if anyone else, the next of kin. That car is something sacred to me, the final resting place of my brothers. And those pigs have desecrated it. By making it public they have forever besmirched the memory of my brothers. They have violated our family. Nobody should have seen it. You are bad for our country. You act as if you are Christians when you are in fact the opposite. Society should reward you with the utmost disdain for your work. I know that now. I have felt it with my own body. When you humiliate and violate someone who is so wounded and disoriented, you breed your own terrorists. I will get my revenge.

I don’t say a word to my boyfriend. I retreat back into myself and swear revenge. I’m not going to drag my boyfriend into it. They will get what’s coming to them. I swear to myself there in the hallway that I will not rest until I have killed them for this. After I have stared dumbfounded long enough at the wreck of my mother’s car, I notice other details that make me even angrier. I have that rage bottled in a tiny decorative glass
vial stored deep inside my heart—the liquid inside is dark green—waiting for a chance to strike back, to return them the favor for what they did to me that day.

There are huge letters on the page. I can’t decipher them because I am apoplectic with rage. I am too angry to read. Flames flicker above the giant letters. Some graphic designer did that in the editorial offices yesterday, right after our accident. He sat at his computer and, with his mouse, added flames to each letter. And then he placed the letters above the huge photo of my mother’s burned-out car. Come along now, fire. I hope he’s proud of his work. Every day I hope that person gets cancer of the hand—of the hand used to operate the mouse that day. Maybe he will get it. I keep hoping so.

That was the first and only day I allowed a relative to throw a single cent into their greedy maws or didn’t berate the person afterward for doing so. My boyfriend looks at me oddly. My dear boyfriend. He is totally overwhelmed by the situation.

He can tell I’m cooking something up, but he can’t possibly fathom the scale of what I’m envisioning. I fold up the page until it is very small, then go into our room, and put it under the pillow on my bed. It will always be a reminder for me. And sustain my rage until I strike. I will be a hero. I will be a hero. I always wanted to do something heroic. Nice. Now I know what it will be.

The second day of the end of my life has just begun. I share the hospital breakfast with my boyfriend—a coffee and a gray piece of bread topped with a slice of cheese. The nurse says unfortunately they can’t bring three breakfasts—everything is accounted for. No problem.

We all take turns keeping watch over my mother. The English relatives want to relieve me. They notice that in focusing on my mother I am underplaying the extent of my own sense of loss. While taking a turn on watch, however, my uncle commits a fatal error. He thinks,
Okay, my sister
—that is, my mother—
is asleep, so I’ll go get a quick breath of fresh air, stretch my legs, and grab a cup of coffee from the cafeteria
.

This is a reconstruction of what followed, as I was unfortunately not there to stop it. I would have beaten them black-and-blue, the pigs. Nobody was there to protect my burned, bewildered, pumped-full-of-drugs mother from them. A camera team sneaks into the hospital with their equipment camouflaged with flowers. They go unnoticed by the doorman, somehow find out where my mother is, enter her room, and wake her up. They then maliciously lie to her. Their story goes like this: “We’re terribly sorry that you lost your children in the accident. A truck driver was at fault. We’re doing a report against trucks on the autobahn because they cause so many problems.” With that, they have my poor mother hooked. She sits up in bed and thinks—half-asleep and disoriented as she is from the atrocious accident—that she needs to give an interview to try to prevent any further such accidents. We all know that journalistic ethics are not the hallmark of those types of TV news shows—they are pure blood porn. My mother, an Englishwoman in Germany, never paid much attention to TV in this country and has no idea what these shows are like. She trusts their motives are honorable.

She lets herself be filmed, with cuts and burns on her face, with her wild charred hair, with her knowledge that her boys are dead buried deep in her mind and suppressed by drugs. Before
any doctor, clergyman, or relative had a chance, this camera team took the liberty of talking to my mother about her dead children. The doctor had told me it would be many days before they would let anyone talk to her about it. And then they just break into my mother’s room and fuck her in her broken soul. And I don’t stop it. I put my trust in my uncle and he failed me.

When I return and hear about the invasion, I shout at my mother. “Why did you do it? Why did you speak to them? Why didn’t you ring for someone and have them thrown out? Those rapists!”