Greetings from the Vodka Sea Page 3
It’s an erroneous belief that every suicide victim leaves a note. Most do not. In fact, most people go out of their way to make their suicide look like an accident. A car drives over an embankment. A woman out for an evening stroll stumbles into the sea. A lonely young man in a rooming house falls asleep with a cigarette in his hand. Psychologists, the coroner tells me, believe most “accidental” deaths are suicides of one sort or another: contrived, conscious, deliberate, premeditated and otherwise. Who wants to be remembered for taking their own life? (Worse, who wants to jeopardize their life insurance policy?) Not in our society anyway. Maybe in Japan, where I think hara-kiri is still acceptable if not honourable; maybe in ancient Rome or Greece. But in our culture, only a very few — the bravest or the most foolish — leave evidence. A survey of my collection suggests that most people feel a need to apologize; exactly sixty-two per cent of the letters in my possession start with the words “I’m sorry” or some variant. The coroner concurs. Of the letters in his collection, easily ten times mine, most are a kind of justification, although he also sees another force at work, what he calls “the last gasp of the creative impulse.” I know what he means. Many of the suicide notes in my collection are, for example, written as poems. Sometimes they rhyme — I have a least eleven sonnets or poems that take a rough sonnet-like structure, and dozens with less elaborate rhyme schemes — but free verse is more popular, in particular the haiku. This reflects, I think, a general belief that free verse is easier to write than rhyming poetry. Granted, it is easier to sound important with free verse, no one wanting, I think it’s fair to say, an insignificant sounding suicide note. It’s another interesting statistic that most suicide notes are written by men, despite the fact that the overwhelming number of suicide attempts and a significantly higher proportion of successful suicides — there’s an oxymoron for you — are carried out by women. This supports the coroner’s “last gasp” theory, I think. Men are much more drawn to the notion of their place in history than women are — I’m not being sexist here, it’s just what I think. Men are much more inclined to need a last burst of literary achievement, a demonstration of their creative prowess in the face of what they see as the ultimate act of sacrifice and destruction. Don’t roll your eyes, that’s how men think. For many women, I suspect, suicide is a creative act in itself, which needs no justification.
I have not been a collector as long as the coroner. In fact, I did not start my collection until after I met you. It was on the drive home from Niagara Falls — the second time, our honeymoon — that I realized two things: I loved you, and I needed a hobby, something to collect. You made a remark. Remember, we’d stopped off at your mother’s house, and just as you stepped out of the car, your teal pumps sinking halfway into the mud, your sister opened the screen door with her new hair and a new man on her arm. What did you say? You always say the right thing at the right moment, and that was the perfect thing to say. Your sister came and took your arm and helped you through the mud, and her friend took the suitcase from my hand gallantly and carried it to the house. He was an investment banker from Mexico, the wetback with the green-backs, your sister said; she always had a thing for Latin men. Your mother met us in the hallway, and she hugged me tightly and kissed me like we’d known each other all our lives, like she was my mother, not yours, or our mother, even though I’d never met her before. Your stepfather forced himself out of his chair and shook my hand and said, “I guess you’re part of this crazy circus now.” You sat on the red settee, rubbing your swollen feet, with your hair piled high and your sunglasses on like a movie star; that’s the moment. That’s when I knew I loved you. Your sister talked about a springtime many years earlier when you tried to hatch a robin’s egg that had fallen out of the nest. You kept it on the hot water pipe in your bedroom in a cereal bowl full of torn-up yellow toilet paper. And finally a beak appeared and a tiny head, and your sister said she wanted to crack the egg open to let the chick out. But you wouldn’t let her. You said it would have to get out on its own or it was as good as dead. (Where did you bury the chick, I forget, by the birch tree in the back yard?) And all the time your mother sat there on the edge of the sofa, both hands supporting her cane, correcting your sister and shushing your stepfather whenever he opened his mouth.
And when she could contain herself no longer, your mother burst out, “So you’re married, honey, I can’t believe it! I’m so happy for you.” (Although the family politics, the sharp look to your sister and her rolling her eyes, did not escape me.) Then your step-father saying out of the blue, before your mother could hush him, “I’ve married off five and buried two myself. That’s not bad batting.” The Mexican laughed majestically, then suddenly stopped, embarrassed. And in the silence that followed, that’s when it struck me: I had a family now; I had a crazy circus. An urge overcame me, the urge to hunt and gather. The urge to collect.
The most celebrated piece in the coroner’s collection is a suicide note by none other than Sir Winston Churchill. The great statesman never in fact killed himself, but that does not diminish the value of the piece in the eyes of a collector. Churchill was hounded most of his adult life by the Black Dog of Depression and drafted at least seven suicide notes. The coroner’s is considered to be Churchill’s finest. It is written on ivory vellum and still has, if you hold it close to your nose, the raw scent of leather, like a magnificent leather-backed chair from, one imagines, Churchill’s study. While most of his other notes are pathetic, he simpers in a most unChurchillian manner, the coroner’s note is beautiful. I’ve copied a passage, which I keep in my wallet. I have wallowed in the trenches; I have whined in the streets and mewed on the hilltops and in the lowest valley; I have suffered You to make this bleak wind kiss my lips and comfort me with the cold; I do not ask much, my Lord, just the comfort of the cold. You can almost hear the great man’s voice as you read. The coroner picked up the Churchill note while he and his wife were on holiday in Zurich. (She, by the way, is completely aware of his hobby and finds no malice in it; she is happy he has an interest outside his work, which can be very consuming, and has on several occasions presented him with suicide notes for his birthday or at Christmas.)
The coroner had the good fortune to come across an antique dealer who specialized in suicide notes — the Europeans, as always, being much more tolerant. The owner, a Pole, first tried to sell the coroner Adolph Hitler’s authentic suicide note, which, to a collector, is suspect, in the same league as a sliver from the true cross or a deed to the Statue of Liberty. Once the Pole figured out that he wasn’t dealing with a rube, he got out the real goods. The coroner picked up the Churchill note, along with a certificate of authenticity from Sotheby’s, for just under twenty-five thousand Swiss francs, which is, I can assure you, a bargain. While I haven’t anything as exciting as the Churchill note in my collection (the coroner has given me a certified copy, under the stipulation that I neither sell nor reproduce it), I have a couple of pieces of which I am justifiably proud. Of some historical significance is a note from Edwin Miles, the only survivor of the Charge of the Light Brigade (in truth, the validity of this piece is in some doubt). My favourite piece is a note by one Günter Polphner, Herman Goering’s personal chef. Written on the back of a recipe for stuffed green peppers, it says simply, “Dear Lord, turn me over when I’m done.”
I think it’s true what you said, that every man must spend time in the company of strangers. It was years ago, I know, but every time I look at you I hear you saying it again. We were on the sand by the lake, and the moon’s light fell across your face; I could see your cheeks and lips; your eyes were shadows. You had just revealed to me the first of your secrets — how you concealed it from me I’ll never know. It seemed at first only a small bump on your chest, but when I looked more closely I could see that it was in fact a third nipple, just as you said. “It’s not so uncommon, really . . .” But you didn’t need to apologize. I kissed this and all your nipples, and, enjoying the compression of you above me and the war
m sand below, I fell into a kind of sleep. In the distance I could hear your sister talking as always. What colour was her hair then? Black or white? In my near-sleep I remember the sound of the paddles as they stirred the water, and I think by then the Mexican ambassador was singing to her in Spanish, something vaguely familiar, like a lullaby, although the words and melody didn’t register. Yes. That’s it. “London Bridge.” In Spanish. I’ve always wondered if you heard it too. I did not hear the splash as your sister dove into the water, and I don’t recall anything before the ambassador called her name. By then, you were calling too. I followed the trail of clothes to the water’s edge and saw you waist deep in the water, calling, calling, calling your sister’s name. The ambassador, who once worked as a pearl diver and had tremendous breath control, scoured the bottom of the lake, while we did the best we could from the cumbersome rowboat. It was almost dawn when the police divers arrived with their scuba tanks and sonar equipment. You stayed on the water in the rowboat the rest of the day and into the following night. It’s not so strange that we never recovered her; the police captain, the one with the twitch and the stammer, said that the lake was cluttered with sunken stumps; a four-foot layer of mud and silt covered its bed. Finding her would have taken a miracle. The search continued for a week, but all we came up with was her waterlogged hairpiece, which had drifted to shore on its own. I’ve always wanted to ask you, how come you never cried? Not when she went missing, that’s understandable, there was work to do. But not even later, when the police called off the search, or when we found your mother in a heap on the floor of her living room with her dress wet with tears and a photograph of your sister in her hands, which she held so tightly that it tore when we tried to take it away from her. I’d thought you’d cry then. But you seemed indifferent, cynical at best. You laughed at the funeral and ridiculed us for spending two thousand dollars to bury a thirty-dollar hairpiece. Afterwards, you laughed when your stepfather tried to put things into perspective. “At least this tragedy has brought us all closer together,” he said. And later as I drove you home from the cemetery I confessed to you that I had never felt more alive than I had during the search, working shoulder-to-shoulder with the police, all of us focused, and that I had never felt closer to anyone than I felt to you right then in that car. That’s when you said it. “Men need the company of strangers. Men only come to life when they’re surrounded and involved with people they don’t know.”
The coroner says most people wait until the spring to kill themselves. Death in general is more abundant in the spring; hospitals and old folks’ homes routinely report the highest number of deaths in March and April. The coroner sees this in a positive light, and I agree: people hold on to life for as long as they can. Surviving one more winter is, if not a small victory over death, at least a slap in death’s face. I’ve come to think of you as this kind of person, the kind who plans to make it through one more winter. I think you’d like the coroner. In a lot of ways, he’s similar to you. Stoic, that’s the word. Stoic, but in the good sense. Not like an institution, but stoic like a well-fed farm animal.
I wanted to tell how I came to collect suicide notes, but it’s not a very interesting story. A fluke, more or less. I chanced upon a note. I must confess that I was very apprehensive about telling you anything at all, especially at this time. But in a relationship like ours, we should be able to tell each other our deepest secrets as easily as we say “I love you.”
I wanted very much for this to be about someone else, but it’s about you.
I’ve read your note. I was going to put it in my collection, but the coroner’s offered me a handsome sum for it, and, at this point in our relationship, I think I should accept his generous offer.
Greetings From the Vodka Sea
They’d heard rumours of marauders sweeping down from the hills to rob tourists and worse, but the sun, the salt air and the stillness of the Vodka Sea immediately put their minds at ease. The hotel, the Crown, was even better than the brochure promised, with the recent addition of two huge kidney-shaped pools linked by a swim-up bar nestled in the plaster grotto. The bar was called the Queen of Hearts, and the heart motif was echoed in everything from the heart-shaped stools rising out of the warm salty pool water and the heart-shaped water-proof doilies (what was the point of those?) down to the cupid cherry skewers and the complimentary heart-shaped chocolate mints, wrapped in red or silver foil, that accompanied the bill. The romance of the place was breathtaking, and the two of them, Dr. and Mrs. Hammond, let themselves be drawn into it. On the first night the normally shy and reticent Monica unselfconsciously gratified her new husband manually in the shadowed hot tub (oddly spleen-shaped) that bordered the grotto, even though they ran the risk of being caught (slight, given the lateness of the hour and Bruce’s unmoving, impeccable silence that gave nothing away) or at least discreetly witnessed from a distance. In fact, the thought that they might be being watched (discreetly, that is, from a distance) heightened the experience for both of them. They relaxed and snuggled in the aftermath of Monica’s handiwork and tried not to think of the bubbling unhygienic residue of the hundreds or thousands of similarly indiscreet couples who’d honeymooned before them. As they watched the stars vying for attention in the incalculable distance, they could hear the Vodka Sea caressing the shore. It was, they would agree later, the happiest moment in their lives.
That first morning they walked to the sea. It wasn’t far, just past the mango grove (Bruce was quite certain that mangos were not native to this part of the world) at the far end of the grounds beyond the pools and tennis courts. One could cut through the grove (although they had been warned to watch for a small green snake, a kind of viper that could deliver a nasty and mildly toxic bite), or one could take the asphalt laneway that wound along the outside of the grove. That first morning they took the laneway; however, as time and their sense of London slipped past, they favoured the shortcut more and more.
The beach itself was splendid. Perfect round beads of pinkish-white sand, the colour of Monica’s skin, tickled and massaged their bare feet. No sharp stones or rubbish or aluminum flip tops or bits of broken glass, so unlike Bristol’s shaggy shores or those impossibly filthy beaches on the continent. Just warm, gentle beads. Monica said she’d love to lie in those beads fully naked, allowing the sand to surround her and warm her every cranny. Bruce squeezed her shoulder, and she understood that he would take her right then and there on the warm soft sand, if it weren’t for that couple with two small children, on holiday from America, enjoying their morning coffee. Monica walked to the shore and put her pink toe in the water. It was colder that she imagined, not that it was cold, in fact it was probably just a few degrees below body temperature, it’s just that she’d imagined it would be warmer. She breathed deeply. The smell of salty air (with a slight tinge, a wisp, of vodka) filled her lungs and invigorated her.
“Do you think it’s safe to swim?”
Bruce was way ahead of her.
“Bathing is permitted and encouraged,” he read from the full-colour brochure. “The salt density is five times greater than that of the Atlantic Ocean. No one has ever drowned in the Vodka Sea.”
Monica nudged out another couple of inches.
“I wonder, are there fish in it, then?”
Bruce plunged into the brochure. “I’d suspect not. The alcohol combined with the salinity — well, bugger me. The Vodka Sea supports several unique species of aquatic plants and a high concentration of free-floating crustaceans, close relatives of the brine shrimp. These are the single food source of the Bolen’s dwarf whale. No bigger than a carp, this Lilliputian leviathan is the largest inhabitant of the Vodka Sea.”
There was a picture of the whale in the bottom left corner of the brochure, a cartoonish drawing of a miniature blue whale breaching, curls of water rolling from its blowhole. At the top of the spout tumbled smiling shrimp sporting top hats. Bruce scanned the horizon.
“What are you looking for, love?”
She hugged herself, almost blushing. “Miniature whales! Isn’t this absolutely the most romantic place on earth?” She turned back and smiled at Bruce and he reciprocated. And at that very moment a tiny whale surfaced not ten feet from them and fired a handful of mist into the air before surrendering to the sea again.
. . .
McGuffan told them all about the Vodka Sea over dinner that night.
“The whole thing sits on a kind of peat bog,” McGuffan explained. “Layer upon layer of castings and roots that have decayed and built up since time began.”