I’ve always felt as if my life needed explaining. Like my existence was a kind of imposition.
I talk and talk to try and explain what I am, in the end it only makes things worse.
There was one person in my life, though, I didn’t need to explain a thing to.
-
Margrethe, or Gretchen, came to me almost wordlessly one autumn. It was one of those really dismal autumns, where the sky is a pool of mercury, the trees all wet and bare. The clouds descend on the town, hanging like tarpaulins on taller buildings, pouring forth a flood of fine raindrops that adhere to everyone and everything. The streets are the color of chocolate cake where the rain, the mud, emptied chamber pots have all coalesced into one slick semisolid that bogs down pedestrians and carriages.
The ducks had all flown, so it was just me at the pond. I looked into it, trying to see my face again, but the wind was too strong. It stirred up the surface of the water.
I was down and out. I was a tragic case. I thought I’d turn my life around when I found it - an Ancient relic that went for an astronomical sum. Some big-wig who fancied himself a collector was in town, and spared no expense relinquishing it from me. I was only too happy to oblige him.
It was the first time in my life, or maybe the only time, when I had a great sum of money at my disposal. I thought I’d move out of my broom closet of an apartment, buy some nice clothes, make something out of myself, while still keeping enough in the bank for a rainy day.
That’s not what happened.
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My father passed on after an exceptionally long and bitter life. He was dealt a rough hand to be sure, but never once did it occur to him through all his drinking, whoring, beatings, he made everyone around him suffer in the way he did, as if they weren’t miserable enough. He brought the misery of the factory back home with him every night, when he stumbled in after a bender, his eyes wide and red, looking in every direction. He was ashamed. I think he wanted to come home and find the house empty, and was so angry when he found the two of us, me holding on to the strings of my mother’s apron, my mother stoic, silent, yet saying everything with her eyes, that he did the unthinkable.
The only thing we could afford were these macaroni noodles - we lived off the stuff. Night after night, my mother would cook it up in a great dented pot after working the whole day herself, gods bless her, how’d she ever manage it all, and every evening we’d bolt down our allotment, try to finish it before we noticed the taste. One evening my father wasn’t having it. He spooned up a big helping, and brought it up to my mother’s face.
“Taste it”, he said.
“What?”, asked my mother, tired.
“I said taste it”, gesturing with the spoon.
“I know what it tastes like”, my mother smiled weakly, hoping this was just some kind of strange joke.
“I don’t think you do”
“Pardon?”
“If you knew what it tasted like”, he got up, "if you knew how it tasted", said as if he were bracing himself, “You wouldn’t feed us this shit!”, now yelling. He threw his bowl across the room where it smashed against the wall. The macaroni dribbled down slowly, sticking to the painted metal. “You wouldn’t feed it to us every goddamn day! I come home, and I pray to the gods that something, anything else is there on the table. And what do I find? The same fucking macaroni!”
He was panting. I think he was nervous. I think my father was ultimately a very meek man. Everywhere else in his life, he was the butt of the joke. The foreman tormented him, his friends only kept him around for a laugh, getting him riotously drunk so they could hear him rant about his conspiracy theories. Always going on about the dwarves at the slightest provocation. What more justification could he have needed to prove that the world was run by a great conspiracy than what was right in front of him, that he gave his life to run a machine for some nobleman who would never know his name? That his wife and child were giving their lives to make cravats? But even as his foreman beat him and told him off, he was convinced the whole time it was the dwarves that made his world a waking nightmare.
When he got home he had to be the big man. We were the only people he could control, that he could hurt if he wanted to. That’s the problem with meek men: they come off kind-hearted, but that’s only because they’ve never occupied a position of power. As soon as they do, they inflict every bit of pain that they’ve been made to feel by their betters, and exact it with the mawkish, self-conscious anger that warps the mind of their victim, makes them feel bad for the abuser even when they’re getting one upside the head. I guess that’s what he’s done to me. He was nothing but terrible, and here I am, giving him a place in my writing, like there’s something to him. I only wanted to bring him up so I could dismiss him again. There’s no story here. I wanted to explain him insofar as it explained what happened with me and Margrethe, so I’ll limit myself to just that now.
One night I was roused from sleep, and found my father standing above me. I could smell the liquor on his breath. He’s wearing this goofy smile, holding something long and thin in his hand. He brought it into the light and I could see what it was: a dingy tin whistle, the kind kids sell on the street by accosting passerby. He foisted it on me and told me to try it. I didn’t really want to, especially not at this hour, but I acquiesced, and breathed into it. It didn’t make a sound.
“No, like this”, my father said, and pursed his lips. I blew into it again, pursing my lips this time, and produced a magnificent toot.
My mother shouted from the other room. The noise had woken her up. She needed to be at the cravat factory by the crack of dawn, and my father and I had just robbed her of a few precious hours of sleep.
My father ignored her.
“Try it again”, he insisted. I blew into the whistle. Through the wall I could hear my mother quietly lamenting her circumstances. This didn’t seem to bother my father.
“Here”, he said, and took the flute from me. He played a stilted rendition of “hot cross buns”, then showed me the fingerings so I could too.
“Now you try”, handing me back the instrument. I gave an experimental puff, then began the song. I played hot cross buns while my mother cried softly in the other room. My father watched me, grinning ear to ear.
-
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I had always hit the bottle more than was good for me. It was part of the culture. After a dungeon, where would you go other than to the tavern? A way to forget the pain of today as well as the worries of tomorrow. When you had a tall, frosty stein in front of you, good friends all around, what could be more distant than a dungeon? Funny to think about now - I don’t remember ever drinking alone then. The possibility just hadn’t entered into my mind, like I hadn’t put two and two together. When I eventually did, it was a moment completely empty of portent. Nothing could’ve been more mundane than that first trip to the liquor store. The colorless faerie lights, the clerk who’d never seen me there before, smiling, maybe thinking I was off to a party somewhere. I bought my bottle and took it home. I drank myself to sleep. For a moment I felt weightless.
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Soon enough my life was a commute between two nodes, my bedroom at one end and the liquor store at the other. Heaven and hell. Heaven was being weightless in bed, a bottle in my hand. Hell was the sweat, the trembling, as I made my way to the counter. And the clerk, who I’d seen entirely too much of, and who’d seen too much of me, gives me my change while avoiding eye contact. I have to wonder what was going on in his head while we made our daily transaction. Did he feel he was letting me die? Did he carry that weight with him when he got home, had dinner with his wife and kids, got up in the morning and dressed? Then I remember I certainly couldn’t have been the only tippler he was serving. I bet it comes with the territory, not worth losing sleep over.
I ate through the money at an alarming rate. The liquor and food, despite being my only expenses, totaled up faster than I was expecting. Even as my clothing fell apart, my room piled up with empty bottles and the greasy scraps of lousy dinners, my mattress turned a golden brown, I kept barreling towards that darkening horizon which promised nothing but escape from today. I knew I didn’t have long before I was broke. I kept at my interminable commute regardless. I had no interests, no relatives, my friends were long gone. Maybe I hoped the liquor would kill me before my funds ran out.
I knew I’d hit rock bottom one night when I’d heard a shuffling from inside a greasy serviette I’d dropped by my bedside. I opened it. Inside I found an enormous black roach picking at the remains of a mutton sandwich I’d bought earlier that day. I took my bottle in my hand, and lowering it slowly onto the roach’s neck, beheaded it with a downward motion. I lifted the bottle and saw bits of roach on the bottom of it. I downed the last of the whisky.
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I don’t know how she found out about me. Sure, I’d made something of a name for myself by then, felling an Orc King in one hit, but I still scratch my head thinking about the how and why of her ending up unlatching the bolt to my room, clearing a path through the refuse, and turning my head to the side so I didn’t drown in my own vomit. What did she get out of it? It still baffles me to this day, just what she was playing at?
I’ll never forget this - she walked briskly to the other side of the room and parted the curtains. Light poured in, revealing just how far I’d fallen. Piles and piles of trash forming a kind of topsoil along the floor, roaches crawling up the walls, bottles rolling and clinking with every step she took. She huffed and put her hands to her hips. She got down to business.
It was a hell of a thing to watch her work: she put on some coffee, left, came back with this huge skin sack, easily as large as herself, that she started shoving all the trash into. When the worst of it was gone, she swept up the rest and deposited it into the sack as well. She washed her hands in a basin she’d brought then, now that the coffee was ready, poured me and herself a big, steaming cup.
We made small talk about the terrible weather. Complete pleasantries that didn’t so much as skirt around the topic of my filthy room as it did disregard it. Drunk as I was, I accepted this new development in the way one accepts the logic of a strange dream. What Margrethe entailed, what she had in store for me, I didn’t think much about it just then, though it would pretty soon eat at me something terrible.
When we’d finished our coffee she got up again and left the room. She came back with some cleaning supplies, a sponge, towels, and set to work scrubbing the floors and walls. The interior of my room was in a real sorry state, so it wasn’t long before the soapy water in her washtub took on a murky, light brown tinge, making her constantly enter and leave with fresh quantities of the stuff.
She had a kerchief tied over her hair, and a long, aproned dress made of a roughspun material. She was a powerful woman, with arms large and coarse like a man’s. Her hair was thin and she kept it long. Though her manner was anything but feminine, after cleaning up my flat I found she took great pride in the way she fashioned her hair, working it with all sorts of clamps and pins, elaborate coifs that would disintegrate if you looked at them funny. She would wear this bright purple ribbon all the time, and it goes without saying that it contrasted somewhat with the rest of her. But I really shouldn’t be sizing her up like this. That wouldn’t be fair, not after all she did for me.
She cleaned me up, changed my mattress, took me to the theater that day. It was a tragic opera about a spurned lover who strangles his raven-haired, winking inamorata in the last act. Realizing what he’d done, he doesn’t waste a second offing himself too. That’s a funny start to our relationship. A passion you’re willing to kill for. Nothing could’ve been farther from our situation.
-
Margrethe smoothed out all my rough edges, dressing me in the morning, slapping me very slightly on the arm if I took to picking myself in public. She greased my hair and shaved my face, asked if I had eaten. She knew which colors became me, what clothes matched my frame, and could tell at a glance if I’d had a bracing swig of something before I’d gone to meet her. Sometimes I thought I was real smooth, that I was acting sober enough, only to see the look in her eyes, the disappointment, and know that she knew. Those glances tore me down every time. There was no need to check my breath.
We spent an enormous amount of time together, who even knows why? What did we have in common, exactly? We went to the opera, the duck pond, the royal gardens - an interminable number of Sunday strolls. Sometimes we just sat around the house, eating biscuits and playing cards. Sometimes we did nothing, and just sat next to each other. Each time I thought, ok, now she’ll fill me in. Now she’ll tell me some vital piece of information about herself, and it’ll all fall into place. Or maybe she’d stop one of our card games, stand up, and laugh at me, and go “I really had you going, didn’t I?”, before slamming the door in my face.
But that never happened. She was a mystery to me then as she is now. I was a coward. Anyone else would’ve asked eventually, why are you doing this, what do you stand to gain? It could’ve been so simple if I only took charge. I was afraid, though. Of what exactly, I couldn’t tell you. I think I meant to keep her in the dark, never drawing notice to what was going on between us. Funny as it is to say now, we never did much more than hold hands. Sometimes she asked if I wanted to, sometimes it was me. Neither of us made any sort of advance beyond that. I guess I didn’t give her any reason to do otherwise.
I think I must have liked her. Just not enough. What it comes down to was, throughout all those walks, all those card games, I was thinking I could do better, as crazy as that sounds. She was all but wiping my ass for me, and yet every time we held hands, or she buttoned my collar for me, I thought I could close my eyes, open them, and see the woman of my dreams standing before me. Even though she took me as I was. I didn’t have to explain a thing, and still it wasn’t enough.
-
She promised me that if I stayed sober she’d bake me a cake. Like I was a child. Maybe that isn’t too far off, after all.
I quit drinking, I couldn’t stand her looks, started drinking these waterskins full of pink lemonade instead. Every morning I’d go to the market and fill the canteens I used to bring to dungeons, right up to the brim. I’d bring it home and empty it gradually throughout the day as a kind of substitute. Margrethe said to me, drink just as much of that pink lemonade you like, as long as you lay off the stuff. I said that was ok.
Well this went on for a long time. Longer than I would’ve expected for myself, but maybe you’ve got different ideas about me at this point. I visited the duck pond every day, looking at my reflection, sitting on the bench taking sips from my waterskin. At night I’d come home to meet Gretchen, who’d cooked dinner, and we’d eat while making chit-chat, artfully bypassing any mention of what we were to each other. After that we’d settle in with a game of gin rummy.
This went on so long that she decided she’d finally make that cake for me like she promised. She goes out to the market to buy all the ingredients one day, leaving me alone at the flat. She’d told me to go through my lockbox, see what I did and didn’t need. That was my chore for the day. I pick through my things, most of it was junk, not that I was willing to throw it away, when I see it. For some reason I’d held on to that tin whistle my father gave me.
I put the waterskin down and lifted the instrument to my lips. I gave it a puff, playing a shrill, high note. The same kind of note that woke my mother. I tried to get the fingering right, and, though the sounds it was made up of were halting and garbled, I managed to power my way through hot cross buns.
As the song ended I realized I would never come to love Margrethe.
She pushed the door open with her leg, her arms wrapped around a bulging bag of groceries. She set them on a stool, looked over, and saw me stretched out on the floor with a bottle in my hand.
-
I don't remember as much of the tears, the anger, the questions that followed as I should. There was just one that stuck out to me by virtue of its terribly sad, supplicating tone. A lot was resting on how I answered it.
"Why do you drink?", Gretchen demanded of me. I said nothing. No matter what I said it wouldn't do.
There was no explaining my father's tin whistle.