The Universe Versus Alex Woods (40 page)

Mr Peterson started making a strangled choking noise. It took me several moments to realize that he was laughing, and even longer to realize that I was laughing too. Not the kind of laughs you make at a joke, but huge, hysterical, hyena laughs that wracked my whole body and sent tears streaming down my cheeks. It was several minutes before my head had cleared enough to allow me to read his next note.

You’re OK?

‘I’m okay.’

Great. So let’s get out of here
.

I flipped the ignition and pulled back onto the road. Ten minutes later, we were on the A303, racing east into the deepening night.

When we disembarked in Calais, it was about 6 a.m., local time, and the eastern horizon was just starting to brighten. We left the port a few minutes later, passing the customs gate unhindered, and then drove a hundred miles before stopping for breakfast just outside Saint-Quentin.

The Channel had been calm and the crossing unremarkable. By the time we’d boarded the ferry, Mr Peterson’s lack of sleep had finally caught up with him. I left him dozing in his wheelchair in a secluded corner of the lower passenger deck while I went upstairs to the open upper deck. It was the first time I’d been on a boat. It was the first time I’d been further from home than London. I spent most of the next ninety minutes towards the bow, watching the black water swelling beneath me and the stars ascending before me. I was quite alone; the few other passengers on board were all below deck. There were no distractions, just the sound of the sea and the unhurried rotation of the sky. With only minimal on-deck lighting, it was dark enough to make out the broad, silver arch of the Milky Way, which materialized over the stern in Cassiopeia, swept high overhead, and then cascaded south into Sagittarius and the sea. Saturn was sinking starboard in Virgo as Venus was rising in Pisces over the port bow. The flat horizon afforded a novel symmetry and harmony to the sky. It made me think, fleetingly, of my mother – I was sure that she’d have some unfathomable theory about what was going on up there. But this was just a stray thought that came and passed like a mist. For the most part, I didn’t think at all. I just watched, letting my mind drift from sensation to sensation, like a butterfly caught on a warm breeze.

My head was in a curious place. I wasn’t thinking about what lay ahead; and everything that had gone before – at the shop and the hospital – had already taken on the character of a quickly fading dream. Only now seemed real. The adrenaline of escape had long since departed, but it seemed to have somehow flushed out my system, leaving me perfectly calm and alert. Or that was my working hypothesis. I’d also drunk eight cans of Diet Coke since Yeovil, and I wasn’t discounting the possibility that this might have played some role in keeping my mind clear and focussed. Whatever the case, I didn’t need to sleep, and, more than this, I didn’t
expect
to need any sleep until we got to Zurich. It’s hard to explain this expectation without sounding like my mother, but the simplest way I can put things is as follows: getting Mr Peterson to Switzerland was my job; it was the task I’d been appointed to; and once I’d accepted this, I knew that I’d be able to hold myself together for as long as it took. If I had to drive seven hundred miles to Zurich without sleep, then I would. If I’d had to drive to China or New Zealand, or the far side of the moon, I would have done that too. I knew our goal, and I was going to get us there. It was that simple.

I wasn’t tired when we left the port, and I wasn’t tired when we pulled off the
autoroute
at Saint-Quentin. But I
was
ravenous. In the service-station restaurant, I ate about five pains au chocolat, washed down with more Diet Coke, while Mr Peterson managed to eat a croissant by dunking it first in his coffee; because of his difficulties with swallowing, it wasn’t easy for him to eat dry food. After that, he sat with the car door open and smoked some of his marijuana while I found a grassy hillock where I could meditate. The grass was a little wet, but I had a blanket wrapped round my shoulders to keep me warm. The constant rush of traffic became the rhythm of my breaths, rising, falling and eventually fading to nothingness.

We continued in the same vein all the way to the Swiss border, driving in ninety-minute, hundred-mile bursts, stopping at various service stations and small towns along the way so that I could stretch my legs and Mr Peterson could have another smoke. He smoked much more than usual during that ten-hour drive across Europe. He said it was because my final harvest was
an exceptionally smooth and mellow smoke – much too good to waste,
but I thought that there was probably something more going on. I didn’t know for sure that Mr Peterson was experiencing more pain since leaving the hospital, but he was definitely in a certain amount of physical discomfort. The fall had shaken him, and the subsequent two and a half days he’d spent bedbound had taken an additional toll on his mobility. It seemed that even that short period of inactivity had led to some kind of deterioration in his muscles or neural pathways. He was suffering from stiffness and cramps that he struggled to alleviate. It was a visible effort for him even to manoeuvre his legs from the footwell to the ground outside the passenger seat so that he could face the open air as he smoked.

For this reason, and despite my residual guilt, the stolen wheelchair was turning out to be a godsend, and Mr Peterson had been quick to accept the practical arguments for its continued usage. I wheeled him in and out of the services, and we progressed steadily southeast across the country.

The farmland of northern France was more expansive but not otherwise very different from the farmland of southern England. Were it not for the signs and the tollbooths and driving on the right-hand side of the road, it would have been pretty much indistinguishable. But things started to change as we moved into the wine-growing regions further from the coast. By Lunéville, where we stopped for lunch, it didn’t seem so much like England any more; and by the time we stopped at Saint-Louis, just west of the Swiss border, I felt sufficiently in another country to think about calling my mother.

I don’t know what I can tell you about that phone call. It did not go well. Beyond that, there’s not much to report.

It was around 3 p.m. local time, 2 p.m. British Summer Time, and I thought that the five hours I’d left for her to read and digest the contents of my letter might be enough to dampen down her initial reaction. But there was little evidence that this strategy had worked. She started crying the moment I started speaking, and she was still crying when I hung up. In between, she managed only a handful of stuttered sentences. She said, ‘Oh, Alex,’ a lot. She asked where I was and told me that I needed to come home, that nothing bad was going to happen as long as I came home right away. I didn’t know what she meant by this, and I’d already decided that I couldn’t tell her where I was. I could only tell her that I was safe and I’d be back by the end of the next week, but this reassurance did nothing to improve the situation. If anything, it made matters worse. Eventually, after I’d waited a couple of minutes to see if my mother was going to cry herself dry, I asked to speak to Ellie, but it wasn’t even evident that she had heard me.

‘I think perhaps I should speak to Ellie,’ I repeated. ‘Can you put her on?’

My mother continued to cry.

I hung up. There wasn’t much else I could do.

We crossed the border mid-afternoon and entered Zurich an hour later. The traffic was slow-moving and the urban Swiss were calm and considerate drivers, which gave me plenty of time to find my landmarks, spot street signs and orientate myself within my mental map, which, I should tell you, was extremely comprehensive. I’d decided previously that it would be sensible for me to memorize the entire roadmap of the city. This had been an ongoing project for the past month. I’d spent several evenings and lunchtimes hunched over the Michelin map learning by heart various long and elaborate street names such as Pfingstweidstrasse and Seebahnstrasse and Alfred-Escher-Strasse and so on; and then I’d spent several more evenings and lunchtimes familiarizing myself with the different metropolitan districts and their subdivisions. The main districts were numbered one to twelve, and formed two nested arches around the northernmost tip of Lake Zurich, with District One – the Altstadt – acting as the keystone and the other districts counting clockwise in twin layers from base to base. I found this a reassuringly practical approach to town planning; from what I’d been able to ascertain online, the Swiss were a reassuringly practical people. They had a long, proud history of staying out of wars, preferring to devote themselves to more constructive endeavours like science, secure banking and building extremely accurate clocks.

Anyway, although memorizing the Michelin map allowed me to feel instantly settled on the city’s roads, in hindsight, my preparations may have been a little over the top. In case you didn’t know, Zurich is a very distinctive city. It sits in a natural bowl formed by the Limmat river basin and, as I’ve mentioned, is shaped like a tall bridge, or broad horseshoe, with the north tip of the lake forming the thin central hollow. The Limmat bisects the centre of the Altstadt along a straight north–south line, splitting the city into neat, almost symmetrical halves, and the Alps rise thirty kilometres due south from the river mouth. With all these natural signposts, Zurich is not a particularly difficult city to navigate. Or that was my experience.

It probably helped, too, that the District Eight hotel Herr Schäfer had recommended to us was very easy to access by car. Most of the hotels in Zurich are clustered around the Limmat in the middle of town, but ours was located just off Utoquai, the main thoroughfare that runs down the northeastern shore of the lake. Herr Schäfer had a bank of about a dozen hotels that he could recommend according to the varying requirements and budgets of his clients. He had a lot of experience catering for foreigners who came to Switzerland to die.

As for Mr Peterson’s requirements, these were relatively simple. I’d typed them into an email for him about a month earlier, just after confirmation of his appointment date came through. He needed a hotel that was in a reasonably tranquil location, with good road links, onsite parking and facilities suited to the mobility-impaired. His room would have to be spacious and similarly handicapped-friendly, with handrails in the bathroom and at least one sturdy, high-backed chair. In addition, he was keen to get a room with a balcony, and didn’t want to stay in ‘the kind of place you’d go while waiting to die’.

If you can think of a more appropriate way to put that
, he’d told me,
please do.

Unfortunately, I could not, and I thought it better to state his wishes candidly than to risk a misunderstanding. The phrasing above is the phrasing we went with, and when we arrived at the hotel, I thought that this criterion had been pretty well met, although this was another area in which I had little expertise. I’d never stayed in a hotel before – I’d only seen them in films – so I didn’t really know what the kind of hotel you’d stay in while waiting to die would look or feel like. All I can say is that our hotel seemed like a very good hotel to me. It had a big lobby with a high ceiling and tall stone columns and a floor that was made either from marble or a convincing marble substitute. The reception desk had a thick counter of dark, polished wood and a golden sign that had been engraved in German, English and French. It read:

But I thought that at least one of these translations was probably superfluous.

‘
Guten Tag, mein Herr
,’ I said to the desk clerk in my brisk, competent German. ‘
Wir haben zwei Zimmer reserviert. Der Name ist “Peterson”.
’

He was a small, tidy man wearing a creaseless suit and a thin, professional smile. And he replied in precise, barely accented English: ‘Ah, yes. Mr Peterson. Welcome to the Hotel Seeufer. I trust that your stay with us will be a pleasant one.’

‘
Ich bin nicht Herr Peterson,
’ I corrected him.
‘
Herr Peterson ist der Mann im Stuhl.
’

The clerk nodded. ‘Yes, I see. My apologies for the confusion.’

‘
Das macht nichts. Können Sie uns mit unserem Gepäck helfen?
’

The clerk twitched nervously. ‘Yes, of course. I will have one of our porters attend to you immediately. In the meanwhile, there are just a few forms that perhaps you would be willing to complete?’

‘
Ja. Das wird kein Problem sein.
’

It was a strange, ping-pong conversation that continued in this vein for some time. The clerk’s refusal to speak German I put down to some obscure facet of hotel etiquette that I was unfamiliar with. His slightly edgy disposition I put down to my over-zealous, war-film accent. But I left the encounter satisfied that I’d at least been able to make myself understood.

Mr Peterson’s room was on the first floor and was extremely large. It had a tall, arched window and a balcony looking west across the lake, and because it was late in the afternoon, the whole room was flooded with sunlight, like in one of those bad car adverts where the photography’s so overexposed that it hurts your eyes. I had to wait a few moments before I could take proper stock of the interior, but my first impression was that it met all of Mr Peterson’s needs. There were two broad, high-backed chairs, as well as one of those strange sofas with the narrow, stubby legs and only one armrest. The furniture was all separated by ample floor space for ease of access, and there were two up-lighting lamps on metal stands. On one wall was a painting of an unnaturally tall and slender woman with an unnaturally long and thin cigarette, and on another was a mirror constructed from five symmetrically arranged panes of glass – four trapezia and a central pentagon – which looked like the kind of mirror Superman might have in his Fortress of Solitude. All the décor followed this curiously geometrical design, and somehow managed to look very modern and very old-fashioned all at once. Even the chrome handrails in the bathroom looked like freshly sculpted antiques.