The End?

In his eighty years Martin Mercier had never experienced anything like this. In his eighty years he had never acquiesced. No matter what came his way he always expected it. “Le jeu, c’est fini,” he muttered to himself but when he looked at his failing wife Narcisse, he thought, les jeux…her life and his. With their fiftieth anniversary imminent he envisioned the waltz, the pirouette dizzying, her body so close it was indistinguishable from his. Unable to imagine life without her he felt the futile quest of the human spirit an absurd necessity he could now relinquish. As he peered into those chestnut eyes through the dark, endless tunnels that turned back on themselves, his fear returned, one he could not subdue through any amount of logic or discourse. The brain, he decided, was a painful organ, thoughts slicing through it like the jagged edge of a knife. Better to get past all this, better to move beyond it. He sipped from the fluted glass, the effervescence a deceptive reminder of what he would leave behind. The tightness in his chest made his breathing labored and the sweat of his palms made the pills soggy. His wife, on the other hand, was feeling no pain. On the morphine drip she’d been hallucinating a hot, white light surrounding her, evaporating like fog, through which swallows arced and banked off cliffs while the sea below crashed against the rocks with a virulence.
Martin twisted the empty packet of Gaulois, threw it on the floor and opened another. Chain smoking was a luxury he could now afford. “Just think, Narcisse…” He was grinning when he said this. “They will have to clean up this mess.” The ashes, the butts, the spilled champagne, the broken glass from the vial he emptied… By they he wasn’t sure who he meant. Who would be the first to find them? He didn’t want to think about it but he hoped it wouldn’t be the kids. He couldn’t imagine; it was too perverse.

Yes, his children would have to forgive but in time they would come to understand what happened. Especially Dylan, the costume designer. He envisioned the folds of Edwardian dress gathered and stitched for the adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Oval Portrait”--a painter so obsessed with the portrait of his wife he literally steals the life from her. Remembering the nature of the work made him shy away from gazing upon his dying wife’s face for fear he would hasten the end. At this point he simply couldn’t bear it.