All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews

jokes. Jokes are a good indication that you’re feeling better, right?
    Neither Elf nor I spoke. We couldn’t look at each other.
    If you’re well enough to make a joke then I think you’re well enough to join the others for dinner, right? said the nurse. Isn’t that how it works?
    I, uh … said Elf. Perhaps?
    I guess so, I said.
    I’m not sure, said Elf. I fail to understand the correlation between—
    Yeah, yeah, I said. Dinner. I glanced at Elf.
    Indeed, said the nurse. So, no cellphones? She was looking at me. No outside food?
    Righto, I said. I gave her two thumbs up and smiled broadly.
    The nurse left and Elf and I followed her with imaginary gunfire, blasting away with M-16s the way we did when we were girls and the burgermeister came to our house to tell our parents what Jezebels we were. We stopped firing and looked at each other.
    Do you remember when you rescued me in my bedroom? I said. When I was naked and wedged between my bed and dresser?
    Elf nodded. You were practising somersaults.
    Do you remember when we went skateboarding in the hospital tunnel and those asshole boys locked me in the morgue and I was missing for like six hours and you were the one tofind me all curled up on that stainless steel thing where they do autopsies?
    Elf smiled and said oh no, don’t talk about those days.
    Why? I like to remember them, Elf. I like thinking about you rescuing me.
    Yoli, moaned Elf. Talk about now. Keep talking to me about Toronto, she said. She had tears in her eyes.
    I told her that I was in the process of having my tattoo removed. Dan and I have the same one. We had them done by a biker in Winnipeg’s north end in our early days. And that having it removed now hurt more than I thought it would, but under the circumstances I was enjoying the pain and welcomed it. It felt like atonement of some kind. The biker who gave us the tattoos was a member of the Manitoba Warriors and lived in a house with a reinforced steel door that only opened from the inside. But wait, she said, then how did he get in? I don’t know, I said.
    I told her that I’d paid him twenty bucks and a bag of weed to get the tattoo and that I had to pay a thousand dollars to have it removed, and that it would take at least a year and a half because you only got a tiny bit of it removed at each session so that it wouldn’t leave a big crater in your flesh. I told her the laser felt like an elastic band being snapped hard against my back about a hundred times. I had to wear goggles. Afterwards they put Polysporin on it and a bandage and gave me a mint and told me not to shower or exercise for two days and to continue putting Polysporin and fresh bandages on it twice a day for a week. I didn’t bother with any of that.
    I turned around in my chair and lifted my shirt so that Elf could see the fading imprint of my tattoo. It was a jester, anold-fashioned harlequin. As I recall, it had meant, I think, that Dan and I together would slay hypocrisy and the duplicity of the world with jokes and magic. She smiled again and closed her eyes. She said it made her sad. I said it made me sad too, but happy. I went on about Toronto, about the kids, each anecdote taking on the shape of a circus tent in my mind. I talked about my hapless love life, about the e-mail I’d received from Finbar the hotshit lawyer telling me that he was calling it off, my life was too intense, too troubled, my family was nuts, I was too emotional. He was bailing, or pulling the plug, or cutting me loose, something watery like that. Throwing me back like one of those fish caught for sport alone and not for keeping.
    Then out of the blue, like that volcano in Pompeii, Elf asked me if I’d take her to Switzerland.

SIX
    “ THERE WAS SOMETHING , I suppose, like a wild waterfall in the headlong, broken, plunging quality of Mary’s life. I stood and gazed at it roaring through the streets of Paris, visible only to me.”
    Which is what Richard Holmes says about Mary