I open another bottle of wine.
I also open a second pack of cigarettes and cough up a tremendous amount of phlegm before I resume smoking, wondering how long it will take for a strict diet of cigarettes and wine to kill me.
When I am drunk enough, I retrieve Albert Camus’s body from the ruined truck.
On my deck, sitting in the wooden Adirondack chair, I lay him across my lap and stroke his stiff back, hoping that I can pet him back to life.
“I’m sorry, buddy,” I say. “I shouldn’t have talked so much about suicide. But a pact is a pact, right? And maybe we will be reincarnated, find each other again—just as soon as I manage to hold up my end of the bargain.”
I’m very drunk, but I still realize it’s morbid to be petting and talking to a dead dog, and so—through snot and tears and cigarette smoke—I put some wood into the clay chimenea, lay Albert Camus on top, retrieve the gasoline can from the shed, soak my friend, and then toss in a match.
Flames shoot up through the little chimney, followed by a steady thick black plume that is slightly less nauseating than the hissing and bubbling and crackling noises Albert Camus’s carcass is making.
“I’m sorry,” I say over and over as the cold bites my face and hands, while tears burn my cheeks.
When the fire goes out, I know I am truly alone.
I contemplate methods of suicide.
Jumping from the roof seems risky. I may not die immediately, and I don’t want to be eaten alive by coyotes as I rot on the deck in a human nest of broken limbs.
The chain saw in the shed seems too extreme.
Kurt Vonnegut style is an option—I have pills and alcohol and cigarettes.
But I settle on starvation, as it will be a horrific penance for having caused my dog’s suicide.
This is the death sentence I give myself: You will consume nothing but wine until you die, and you will die alone, because you deserve it.
I forgo the artifice of the glass and drink directly from the bottle as the sun sets, puffing defiantly on my Parliament Lights, which have long ago ceased to offer any sense of comfort or pleasure. The smoke now assaults my esophagus and lungs, and yet I puff and puff like a magic dragon who has slipped into his cave after losing the one little boy who believed in his existence.
My vision is blurry, but I believe I count four bottles by my feet.
“Albert Camus!” I scream up at the sky. “Albert Camus! Where are you, little buddy? Is there a heaven for dogs? Are you already reincarnated? I miss you! I’m sorry! I am a shit for brains! I am selfish! I am foolish! I should not be alive! I never should have been born! I am truly and utterly sorry!”
I listen to the word sorry echo over the bare maples and oaks that cover the downward slope of land behind my deck and race toward the base of the small mountains in the distance.
“Beautiful view,” the Realtor said when he showed me this place.
“Perfect view for ending it all,” I say now, and laugh. “A good place to die. This will be a happy death, and I will now play Zagreus, the old cripple.
“Albert Camus!” I scream up at the sky. “Edmond Atherton was right! My class was all bullshit! Everyone can’t be extraordinary! It defies the very definition of the word! It’s absurd! And there is no meaning! No meaning at all! It’s just a cruel joke! That’s the answer to the first question! Just a joke! So why not kill yourself?”
I swig more wine, feel red rivers burst from the corners of my mouth and run down my neck before being absorbed into my sweater. I swallow down my need to vomit, and then I’m crying again.
I must be even drunker than I thought, because—before I know what I’m doing—I start to pray.
My estranged mother is a religious woman—she actually became a nun after she was done raising me. Had a “vision” shortly after I graduated from high school. Told me that both Mother Mary and Jesus visited her. They apparently told her she was meant to join a religious community. I thought she had gone insane. The Catholic Church took her in. She raised me Catholic, and I had already unequivocally renounced my faith. I’ve since renounced my mother, mostly because I hate her. But we fall back on what we know when we are weak—and especially when we are drunk.
“What the fuck, God?” I scream up at the sky. “Can it get any worse? I’m not a praying man, but I’m going to ask you just once for help. If you’re up there, give me a sign. If you don’t, I’m going to end it, once and for all. And who could blame me? Help me please, if you exist. Fuck you, if you don’t!”
God doesn’t speak to me as I finish my fourth (or fifth?) bottle of wine and the sun dips down below yonder mountain.
I don’t remember when it happened, but I must have fallen out of the chair, because my left cheek is pressed firmly against the wood deck now, and I don’t seem to be able to get up.
It gets colder.
When my right eye gazes up, it sees that the stars have come out and are shining particularly hard and bright.
“Need to do a little better than that, God,” I mumble.
I shiver in the fetal position, too drunk, too apathetic, to roll inside where there are blankets and heat.
Maybe I will freeze to death, I hope, and then I somehow manage to light up another cigarette, which I let dangle hands-free in my mouth as I lie there on the deck.
I’m on my back now, but I have no idea where my lit cigarette went.
Vision is blurry at best.
I blink several times.
I think I see a shooting star rip through the sky at one point, but I’m too drunk to know what the hell I’m seeing anymore.