Читать книгу After the Monsoon: An unputdownable thriller that will get your pulse racing! - Robert Karjel - Страница 13

Ernst Grip suffered from insomnia. He never got to bed before midnight. He’d sworn to himself that he’d turn in at a reasonable hour, but then when it came time to get ready, a bad feeling would come over him, or else he’d just sit there. Right there, until the clock said past two in the morning, the hours sifting away like sand. Simply gone. So it was, night after night. Up for work the next morning, no more than four or five hours of sleep in the bank. At the end of the week, he wasn’t all there. Everything felt fuzzy. He ate badly and often had headaches. The world was just something that went on outside the thick glass that surrounded him. And so it had been, for almost a year.

Or more accurately, since June 5 of the past year. It was at about eleven in the evening when Benjamin Hayden had died. Around eleven—it was always hard to decide which was the last breath, when there was barely any breathing at all. To Grip, Benjamin had only ever been Ben. It was just them in the room. For more than two days, the vigil had gone on. Hour after hour, Grip had struggled with his conflicting emotions, from his powerful desire to keep Ben with him, to the hope that he would finally let go. Hours of silent tears, comforting words—both for the dying and for himself—along with small confessions and the desire for forgiveness for any wrongs that still gnawed at him.

From Ben, in return, came nothing more than barely perceptible breathing. He’d gotten dehydrated and thin as a thousand-year-old mummy over the past few months. Watching his decline and hearing his sighs had been painful for Grip. Those last weeks, when he barely stuck out from the sheets, had been disturbing. It was more than just the idea of a corpse, it was the tangible presence of death. He saw his own impotence in Ben’s withered figure. There was not the slightest thing he could do to reverse the direction. Death would triumph and told him so. Powerlessness was a condition Ernst Grip despised, as much in himself as in others. Being a victim. And here, there were two. When he thought about it, he told himself that he wanted to remember the way Ben had been before, and that this was his understandable excuse for looking in the other direction the next time the body was exposed. But even though he was ashamed, he turned away.

For there were still traces of life in Ben: in the heat of his hand, in the squinting, brief glances that occasionally rose out of the fog of death. As long as he was able to look up, he saw Grip. He stared Ernst Grip straight in the eye. Seven years they’d been together, seven years to a greater or lesser extent defined by his illness. Ben belonged to the group of gay men who’d held on long enough for the dramatic arrival of antiretroviral drugs in 1996. But by the time help finally arrived, the disease had already made deep inroads. The virus wasn’t defeated, though Ben’s decline was less steep. In the last year, he’d been in and out of hospitals, at first just a few days at a time, and then, toward the end, he couldn’t stay in the apartment in Chelsea more than an occasional long weekend. They went from the joy of a life together to a split in their roles. One who was dying, the other who looked on—and who had to deal with everything that life involved.

Grip yo-yoed between Stockholm and New York. Torn between the desire to take care of and to be with, and the need to work all the overtime he could get in order to pay the bills of his dying lover in Manhattan. For despite it all, Ben wanted to have health care, good doctors always nearby. He’d endured it for so many years, survived so many of his friends, not always out of love of life as much as his all-consuming fear of death. It was fear that had kept Ben alive. But the stream of hospital bills was also an excuse.

Grip’s trips to Stockholm weren’t just about duty and money; they became a way for him to breathe. Not just to be there for someone else, watching and standing by, but to be himself. Himself. To work, to take something on, to do some good. To hear people laugh at a clumsy joke, to get angry with someone without having to hold back. The flow of impressions during the workday kept other thoughts from rising up. There was the vaguely pleasant satisfaction of dealing with the car in the Säpo garage and with equipment in the office, and realizing that he didn’t have to devote every single moment to Ben when he got to work in the morning. But finally, Ben was too weak, and Grip couldn’t work more or borrow more than he already had.

Then there was a hospice for Ben, with a good reputation but grim single rooms. Run by volunteers, the care they offered was essentially a last few days under morphine. Once they moved in, Ben and Grip realized that these four bare walls would be their last room together. Sometimes Ben yelled out, full of anxiety and accusations. Those who worked there called it the release of a dying person’s unresolved thoughts. Grip knew better.

A couple of times at the end, they’d still managed to talk about the good times, agreeing on which were their best memories. Trips to Cape Cod, the house with the fireplace they’d sometimes borrowed by the sea. The café at the Whitney Museum, where they’d sat down and decided to try each other out. These were the bright spots, because when the morphine erased the pain, it also destroyed the ability to hold on to thoughts and talk. The awareness in those squinting eyes became increasingly rare. Just a few quiet words. When did everything fall silent? The breathing slowed. One evening in June, shortly after eleven o’clock, Grip let go of the cold hand.

He sat with the body for a couple of hours and then went home and curled up for the rest of the night. Never in his life had he felt so alone. The worst was knowing it would continue. The feeling of not really knowing what he’d left behind or what would come next.

Grip had never even met Ben’s family. Lawyers, mostly, with a friendly manner and a penchant for living lies. There was a barrier that Ben himself had created. He’d managed to be out everywhere, except to them. Twice a year he went home to Houston to play the returning son, a little sickly, admittedly, but above all straight. In that world there was no Grip—and what they suspected, he could only guess. Given that even the most casual acquaintances knew that Ben was a gay man who ran a gallery, it was as simple as that. He’d forbidden Grip to contact the family before his death. When he died, his elderly mother came up immediately, and his father a few days later. In their eyes, apparently he’d come to New York to clean. “Thanks for your help” and a handshake, that was all they had to say to Grip. He was less surprised by their attitude than by their efficiency. A family of lawyers, with hired henchmen to slash straight through the administrative details. Not even a week after Grip had let go of his lover’s hand, the Flatiron gallery was boarded up.

At a tense meeting in the apartment, Grip was permitted to go around and take what was unmistakably his—not much besides clothing. As soon as he picked up or looked at any of the things that represented shared memories, his parents glared. Even when he lifted up an unremarkable piece of driftwood from New London, the mother stretched her neck vigilantly. Despite his mounting anger, Grip restrained himself. But when he was about to leave, and the father held out his hand for the keys, Grip pointedly held the bundle a few seconds too long above his open palm before he released them. A lawyer was also present, which Grip saw as some kind of passing acknowledgment.

Grip returned that same night. Of course there’d been a spare key. He brought a suitcase with him, and after a half hour going through their possessions, the worst of his anger from earlier in the day had subsided. The twisted driftwood branch lay in his overstuffed bag. When he was done, he moved some furniture around in the apartment, pulled out a couple of drawers, and yanked up the carpet as if someone had kicked it. And then he left, leaving the front door of the apartment unlocked.

After a few blocks, he threw the spare key into a storm drain. Not so much to hide his tracks, as to make sure he wouldn’t be tempted to return for more.