Bonus Round [Short Story]
Vanessa’s friends all agreed, myself included, that she would kill herself eventually. None of us could say she didn’t have a reason, but that’s a privacy I don’t plan to breach. Regardless, at this point we thought of her suicide as a foregone conclusion. I even dreamed about it, though that came long after we’d agreed she’d kill herself eventually. Another friend sat in the passenger seat while I drove us through badlands I’d traveled before with Vanessa herself, now headed somewhere I didn’t know. My friend scrolled through his phone, and saw everyone posting the news that Vanessa had finally ended her life. After I heard the news, I just remember thinking I couldn’t believe I’d found out like that.
I texted Vanessa as soon as I awoke. She hadn’t responded in months—she’d spend weeks out of contact, just living as a ghost—but for some reason that morning I had luck enough to get a reply, with an invitation implied: she’d just arrived at the neighborhood café. I pulled on a pair of jeans and met her in twenty minutes, the dream still echoing in my mind, remembering how much loss I felt when I heard she’d gone.
Took me some time to find her, even though I’d come to meet her, but finally I saw her dark in the corner. Rising to give me a hug, Vanessa looked half-wild: from the looks of it, she’d taken a scissors to her hair on her own some weeks past with every cut uneven, and after that let the flanks all matte. I looked at the table in front of her booth and saw a snack-sized box of cereal she’d poured into a bowl and covered with cream, but which soaked without a spoon.
“I could get you a spoon,” I said, gesturing toward the cutlery.
“No spoons left,” she said. “Just knives.”
I took my seat at her booth. I saw the spread beneath the bowl: watercolors painted on sheets of stock newsprint, some inked with women looking wistful or forlorn in stances suggesting they stared out of windowsills the artist had chosen not to include. Other pages looked more like color studies, stained across a spectrum of competing hues beneath words like, ‘I met you but you never met me,’ ‘There’s nothing I can put in that will put you back,’ and, ‘There’s no worse nightmare than waking up into reality.’
“So, how’s it going lately?” I asked, but I knew it was a stupid question.
“Everything’s falling apart,” she said, pulling a pair of scissors out from under the pages. “So, I guess I’m just doing the same thing.” I felt nervous for a moment when she pulled out the scissors, but calmed down when I saw she wanted only to cut the paper. “How about yourself?”
I shrugged. “I had a dream you died last night,” I told her. She smiled.
“If only,” Vanessa replied. Ignoring her soggy breakfast, she cut the forlorn figures into vertical strips. When she finished one, she brushed paste on the back of each strip and set them on one of the color studies, spacing each strip so that the women obscured their watercolor backgrounds in a pattern like Venetian blinds.
“Is this what you’re doing today?” I asked, hoping she’d find it therapeutic to paint.
“Whatever happens, happens,” she said, using the snack-sized cereal box to press down the strips she’d pasted over her watercolor. “I’m fairly certain that I’m going to die no matter what at this point,” Vanessa said. “So we’ll see what happens today.” She paused to consider her work. “But I filled that prescription, so, maybe today’s the day.”
Maybe I would’ve been shocked before, but I’d heard enough words like this from Vanessa before to resign myself to them. I still knew my old arguments, falling back on the principle of autonomy, and I had no right I had to tell people what to do or not do with their own bodies. But even though I still agreed with all of that, I didn’t feel resigned anymore to the idea that we must let Vanessa end her life, if that’s what she chose. I remembered the loss I’d felt in the dream she wished would come true, with these oneiric reverberations setting my mind adrift while I watched her stain the sky midnight, upon which gazed Vanessa’s women cut apart.
“Can’t you do anything?” I asked her then, not even knowing what I meant at the time. I should have asked, ‘Is there anything I can do?’, but I didn’t mean that either. I only realized later what my question really meant: ‘Isn’t there anything that makes you want to live?’
“There’s nothing anyone can do,” Vanessa replied, not raising her eyes from the night she stained on the paper. “I’ve been to hospital after hospital, stayed in all the county wards… there’s just nothing to do anymore,” she shrugged and withdrew the brush. “It just is what it is.”
“Fine. But what about what you do with what it is?” I said. Vanessa didn’t pause in her work, but she leaned her head in my direction. “Yeah, bad things happen. Terrible things you wouldn’t wish on anyone. But would they happen at all if they weren’t necessary?”
“‘Necessary,’” she quoted, uncapping a black marker so that she could re-letter the statements that her sliced figures obscured. “Nothing’s necessary because nothing matters. Life is meaningless except for whatever meaning we can give it,” she said, cleaning her brush in a water-cup before she chose another color. “I just can’t give mine a meaning that will make it worth living.”
I wanted to talk then about the beauty of the world, and therefore the beauty of the suffering that happens within it, but I knew it would only insult her. Vanessa had suffered more than I could ever imagine, and I wouldn’t ever imply anything beautiful about that. But with the residue of that dream still blurring my perception, I didn’t know any longer if I could just accept what I’d taken for inevitable.
“Life is pointless,” I agreed. “Life is terrible,” I added, like the latter followed from the former. “But there’s no choice except loving every minute of it. No matter what it brings.”
I didn’t know how to explain it, the idea that I didn’t see any choice except to love whatever happened to me: doing anything else would just waste my time. More than that, though—more than anything—I just wanted for this not to be the last time we saw each other.
“Don’t you get it?” she answered, less angry than surprised. She stuck her brush in the acrylics slathered across a cardboard palette, and one of Vanessa’s wistful figures began weeping into a pool that spanned her divisions. “There’s no future where the past didn’t happen.”
I didn’t have an answer for that. Most of us only have phantom futures that could bring either fortune for which we might hope or a crisis that we might meet with whatever dignity we can muster. But looking at Vanessa, even painting seemed like something she only did to pass the time. Her past had already shaped her into a phantom of her own, and I couldn’t help feeling like the words on her painting had come true: that the reality into which I’d awoken had been the same as my nightmare, and she really had died. Still, I couldn’t help but understand her argument. There’s a point after which no one can choose happiness, because the past precludes even the chance of a choice; and once you hit that point, it’s all downhill from there, and there’s no reason to try climbing anymore.
“I’m gonna miss you when you’re gone,” I finally told her.
She shrugged and raised her gaze to mine. If I had to describe the look in her eyes, I’d call it one that would sadden the entire human species, plunge every one of us into melancholy if somehow what she felt then could infect the rest of the planet. “I’m already gone, to tell you the truth. The best you do is take this is like a bonus round.”
I smiled, even though I wanted to cry. I looked again at her cereal. “They’ve got to have spoons by now,” I said, and it turned out they did. Vanessa ate at my insistence, and I bought us a pair of black coffees. Waiting on the barista, I spied a newspaper another patron had abandoned on the counter. I grabbed it and checked the headlines to pass the wait, but they only made me think of the future, and how I could only bet that it wouldn’t include Vanessa. Then the barista surprised me with our coffees and I put the newspaper under my arm while I carried them back to our booth. I put a cup in front of us both and dropped the newspaper on the table.
“What’s that?” she asked, though meaning more, ‘Why’d you bother grabbing that?’
I spread the front page across my half of the table. “Let me see your pencils,” I told her. On the newspaper I sketched a charcoal outline of a woman seated her arms gripping her knees, looking backward at her own shadow cast from what I imagined as a sunset. I couldn’t match Vanessa’s skill, but I could imitate her technique, and soon found myself cutting out the whole figures of the woman, her shadow, and the sunset before pasting them over a page of watercolors with a scene painted for this exact purpose. Across the sand from which the woman had turned her gaze I wrote with Vanessa’s marker, ‘Love every terrible minute.’
After an hour or two, Vanessa and I parted ways. “I love you,” we said to each other as we hugged, and only in my dreams did we ever see each other again.