the end

She had called it a death masque, “With a Q,” she said, “like Poe’s story.” She smiled weakly.

“There is a pun buried there,”she said.

“Appropriately,” he said.

And now she lay before him in the stale lemon light of the hotel room, the masque begun, her hand in his a dove with lapsing pulse, her head firmly wreathed in the milky cloud of a knotted plastic dry-cleaning bag which, once she had lapsed into unconsciousness, he had fixed around her according to her instructions. Inside the cloud she was resting restlessly, her eyes closed but troubled beneath the lids. The room was yellow with the light, its witnessing walls imprinted with the eyes of lost maples. The plastic membrane bunched round her hair like a turban and then smoothed to a transparent window at her face. She swam far beyond this window and began to drown, her troubled breaths pulling it tighter and tighter. Now his breath pained him. The radiator began to knock and far away a klaxon sounded over the inland sea.

The Twilight Doctor had sailed away to Mont Royal and couldn’t see her. After the phone call brought this news she faded into a swoon of depression. He held her for an hour and eleven minutes before she made the decision to go. At first she trembled in his arms, so weak he thought the death she wished for would come to her on its own. He felt an absurd resentment stir, as if a husband cuckolded in his sleep. An hour passed and then another three minutes until he felt her begin to stir as if some blind creature stirring in an ocean trench and about to rise. Gradually she broke through the surface of her stupor, a thin strength returning and with it a thicker resolve: they would have to undertake the death masque. Solicitous, she patted his hand, he would have to help her, have to fetch the sack.

“Mind you this?” she whispered.

Returned to some lost syntax. Lithuanian dusk.

She had packed the kit for the death masque in a velvet sack (red as a womb she said) in her suitcase, the velvet smelling dusty as a stage curtain. In it a green globe of duty-free cognac, jolly as a friar’s belly, cushioned by the dry cleaning bag which had seemingly been folded again and again until it was as soft as a cloud.

Shroud, he thought. The rhyme.

Also folded there a square of rice paper, sepia ink in a delicate miniscule, the east European hand lending an exotic air to the writing.

“Death’s recipe,” she said. “It seemed so ugly to think of dying from a photocopy.”

Further inside the velvet sack the makings of the recipe: an amber plastic vial of capsules with a childproof top, the gelatin capsules in semaphore colors, citrus yellow and scarlet (to be taken after a light meal “so as to avoid vomiting” the recipe said). Inside the vial the faintly bitter scent of walnuts.

A light meal: Water crackers and a tiny jar of marmalade its lid sealed with black foil, pilfered from the room service tray of a much better hotel in better days than this. Soft cheese vacuum packed in an oval plastic tub: La vache qui rit.

“Are you certain you can do this?” she asked. She set the small meal out like a sacrament, a woman’s skill. “You won't be killing me,” she said. He nodded. “The pills and brandy accomplish,” she said, “the veil merely consummates it.”

All my life I have lived with words: fragrant, lapses, tortoise, ardent.

Momentarily he thought she had said consecrates it. He thought she had said accomplice.

She wrapped the plastic gracefully into a turban over her hair, almost primping, then demonstrated how he should slip the veil down over her face at the last securing it at the back of her neck. There were pale golden hairs in the place where she said he should knot the plastic. Her fingers were ancient marble, a faint mottle of violet here and there, texture of cheese, cold as stone.

"If you feel comfortable doing so, you could pinch it over the nostrils, but this is of course not necessary."

She lifted the veil back up over her head in the knowing way a woman might remove her lingerie before a lover. She searched his eyes for sadness.

Have we ever been lovers? he wondered. It was as if she showed him how to please her. Hood of the clitoris sweet as a communion wafer under his tongue. She looked like a chrysalis.

The air was disappearing and he thought he saw her smile. He imagined her eyes. In the yellow light her head in the plastic bag took on the ghastly sheen of a moist cabbage. It was warm in the room and there was no pulse when he made the phone call.

“We will have to charge you with an offense to the crown,” the Constable said. “I am charging you with abetting a death.” He was very nervous. (No, something different: excited. A beautiful woman shrouded in silver on a bed before him, her pearl lips edged in blue. So near death, having slipped free. Thinking of the odd man parked in the stifling green glow of the Lincoln overlooking the lake and a world full of troubles.)

Magdalena whispered, her voice so dry it wasn’t clear whether he heard her. “You could charge every mother in Ontario on that account.”

She had been breathing again for some time, the edge of blue leaving her lips, the moon pallor leaving her face. When it was over he wasn’t clear (he never has been) whether he panicked or simply misjudged how much it took to die. (He knew one day she would ask him.) The EMT arrived with a gurney and a small blue cannister of oxygen and clasped the mask to her mouth with thick fingers (I had already removed the veil, I did not want them to see you like that). At first she moaned under the mask but then she suckled the cold air as greedily as a child sucks the breast. The man smoothed a blue woolen blanket over her on the gurney.

Slowly her eyes sailed back from the mist of a far away place that surely no one else has ever seen or will see again. The men watched her return in giddy silence. This is what Sirens were. After her eyes cleared her voice returned, mordant and dry from the choking and the oxygen. Her words arrived choppily as if an interrupted radio transmission.

“He's innocent,” she rasped. “This I did myself while he was out at the tavern. He came back to save me.”

Her breasts were soft hills under the blue wool. Her eyes said why didn’t you let me die. Yet it wasn’t so bitter as it sounds. Not so sad. She knew he loved her. She squeezed his hand. You are my second mother her eyes said. Your name is Johan Gottlieb and I am the Countess Chrysalis.