Michal Lapinski Studio

 

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I implore your pity, Thou, the only one I love,

From the bottom of the dark abyss where my heart has fallen.

It's a mournful world with a leaden horizon,

Where horror and blasphemy swim in the night.

 

(Baudelaire. De Profundis Clamavi. Les Fleurs du mal)

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It was a chilly November morning. One could feel the first icy bites of an early winter. Alex was coming home from his night shift as an ambulance doctor. He was doing these shifts only because he needed some extra money, his job at the government-run clinic was not paying very well. This time the night hadn't been too bad. The usual stuff, food poisoning, renal colic, a child with a fever and anxious parents. A couple of serious cases that had to be taken to hospital. And just one death certificate. The image of this woman stayed in his mind. She had been found lying in an unkempt bed in her cold, dirty, poor room. She had lived and died alone. The neighbours had notified the authorities when they hadn't seen her for a few days.

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Stumbling across the pavement and fighting the cold, Alex could still see the lonely woman's body, grey and cold, her white ruffled hair, the blotches on her face, the dirt under her fingernails. It struck him suddenly that his mother would have been the same age as this woman, if she were still alive. But she wasn't – she had died quite a few years earlier. 

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Arriving at home, Alex was struck by how uninviting it was. No one was meeting him, only the emptiness and the cold. He tried to keep the room tidy, but it was an old unused flat which he was renting for next to nothing from an acquaintance. It was run down, the furniture was old and shabby, the carpet worn out. Alex did not particularly mind all that, but he hated the cold. And the flat didn't have proper heating, just an ancient gas heater which barely worked at all. Alex put it on max and made himself a cup of hot tea. He didn't feel like eating. He should have been hungry but he wasn't, feeling the familiar mix of tiredness and tension, strung out after the busy and almost sleepless night.

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He didn't wash, couldn't be bothered. He was still freezing. He didn't completely undress but changed into his tracksuit and jumped straight into bed. 

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The quilt was his hope. It was a fancy duck-down one, lightweight but warm and cosy that so reliably helped him relax and get warm. But sadly not this time. He was lying there, under his lovely quilt, tossing and turning. He was still tense, feeling unease and an unspecified ache. He thought, "If only Nina could be here". Her sheer presence always filled his otherwise rather dreadful abode with light and life. Lying in his cold bed, he was missing the soft warmth of her body intertwined with his. He longed for her so much. Maybe she would come in the afternoon. He imagined kissing and embracing her, having a lovely chat and a glass of wine, and then perhaps going to bed together, if she didn't have to rush home. 

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Nina has been his girlfriend for over two years. He was in love with her, and felt loved by her. Even though he had had girlfriends before, it was something different this time. It was so evidently good to be with her, to laugh with her, to cook dinner or play cards together, to make love. It all felt so natural that living apart didn't make any sense. For the first time ever, he was sure that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with this person, to be with her all the time, to breathe the air she breathed. But unfortunately, it had to wait. They did not have much money, and Nina, who was younger than him, still felt very tied to her family.

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And she was not here now! All that longing, that aching for her touch, was becoming unbearable. Alex tried not to think about it, not to feel it too much, and to drift into sleep. But then, into his unsettled and confused mind descended the image of the dead woman's cold, shrivelled body, lying on her lonely bed. The image became blurry and started changing: the poor woman was turning into his mother, becoming his mother as she was dying.

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Recalling that momentous event in his life was still very painful. When his mother, Stella, was dying, he was the only one there with her. It was his special task to look after his mother who was so dear to him; he in turn believed, that he, "her little Ollie”, as she called him, was very special to her. Even though during the sad years preceding her death he was already leading his own life, mostly away from the family home, he felt that it was his responsibility to look after her more than anyone else, and better than his father, whom he considered egotistic and hard. But Alex could not save his mother.

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She did not get cancer, a malignant melanoma, out of the blue. You could not say that it was something that just happened. 

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She was in her early forties when she got pregnant and gave birth to Pete, a sweet baby boy whom everyone cherished. This late addition to the family may not have been planned but could still be a joyous and optimistic happening. But sadly, for his mother it triggered a chain of events which brought about her gradual decline and eventual demise. 

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Stella was blond, beautiful and had an attractive feminine figure. After Pete was born, she gained weight, lost some of her youthful features, and looked drained. On top of that, the treatment she underwent for sciatica left her with partial paralysis in one of her legs. It was affecting her walk, she dragged her leg a little, and stumbled. Moreover, her shapely long legs were for Alex's mum a source of pride. They were praised and admired, seriously or half in jest, by men, and the older she got, the more she needed such admiration and affirmation. Her self esteem, which had never been very high, was becoming more and more eroded. Alex also suspected that his father, whom Stella was completely dependent on and dominated by, may have turned away from her at that time, perhaps towards another woman.

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What happened to Stella next was revealed only retrospectively. In that dark period, her attention focused on a black mole on her leg. It had always been there, but now it acquired an unsettling prominence, as if it had grown in actual size, or maybe just in significance; it became an intolerable blemish, a menacing symbol of ugliness and disfigurement. Stella couldn't do much about what was happening to her, but she could do something about this thing growing on her leg. If she could get rid of it, she would be freed of all her problems. She started rubbing it and rubbing until it bled. This must have continued for quite a while. Eventually, she became worried about the way it started to look and went to see a doctor, who became very concerned. And with good reason. A biopsy confirmed malignant melanoma. The operation would follow promptly, with what appeared to be a good result. 

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However, after two years, the melanoma returned, this time with a vengeance, carrying the death sentence. It soon became clear that the tumour had spread to various parts of her body and had become untreatable. Chemotherapy did not achieve much, apart from toxic side effects. Desperate attempts to implement some "alternative" treatments offered by local shamans amounted to nothing. 

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Alex, who at that time was a medical intern, could not help but be fully aware of the gravity of the situation. Still, he tried to maintain some hope in spite of being convinced of the inevitable. He had abandoned religion some time ago, and considered himself firmly a non-believer. In his desperation, however, he turned to God and gave him another chance. He invoked God to prove his existence by saving Stella's life. God, predictably, failed to respond to Alex's plea.

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Stella was descending into non-existence slowly and quietly, staying in her bed at home till the very end. She had good medical care, and Alex was trying to make sure that she did not suffer unnecessarily, administering all the pain killers, and eventually narcotics, in increasing doses. It was still possible to communicate with Stella when she was less sedated, until the final day when she started sliding into a coma. 

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Alex remembered being with his mother on that day, the sense of her fading away, his desperate attempt "to do something", to talk to the doctors, to give futile injections... But some recollections were missing. He could hardly remember the moment when his mother stopped breathing. He could not recall her body losing its natural warmth, when life abandoned it, leaving a strange, cold and lifeless object, dissociated from the person who was no longer there. In this way, he had removed the evidence of his mother being dead, did not remember her becoming dead, she was just gone. 

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Then, on that cold November night, the lifeless body of his dead mother, which he had somehow managed to erase from his memory, came back in the form of the strange woman's body, no longer deniable, claiming its sombre place in his unwilling mind. 

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Alex was feeling less cold under his quilt. He felt exhausted and foggy, but still could not get to sleep. He took a Mogadon, a sleeping pill, one of the drugs that his mother had used. Finally, he descended into a heavy sleep. 

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He found himself in a dark, muddled and unformed dream space. He was dragging himself through a muddy street as he watched a big cloud forming behind the vaguely contoured buildings. It was becoming bigger, darker, more and more menacing. It sped up as it moved towards him, like a tornado or a swarm of black insects that threatened to envelop and swallow him up. He felt terror at not being able to move, stuck in the mud and about to suffocate. He tried to cry out for help, but his dry throat could not utter a sound... Then he heard a voice. He did not know where it was coming from, and he could not make out the words at first. Then it became louder. Someone was calling him by name, "Ollie, Ollie, wake up, Ollie!". 

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When he slowly emerged from unconsciousness, he saw above him the face of Nina, all wet from the tears running down her cheeks. "What happened?", he asked. She said that she had arrived early, somehow anxious that she had not heard from him, and not wanting to wait till the afternoon to see him. On her arrival, she found the room overheated and stuffy. She could detect a smell of gas and she noted that the gas heater was running on full blast. She saw that Alex was asleep and breathing heavily, his body slightly jerking. She swiftly turned off the heater and opened both windows, then tried to wake Alex up which had not been easy, and had taken her a good ten minutes. 

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It did not take much for both of them to realise what had happened, and how close Alex had been to suffocating from toxic fumes and becoming a cold body that Nina would have found had she arrived later that day. 

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She slid into bed next to him. They were holding one another very tight, laughing and crying, talking nonsense. They were both breathing the same fresh pure air — and loving each other.