In the end, there was a woman and a man. But the man was too much son and the woman was too little mother. She would die without him. She needed everything, and the son did not like to look at her. He needed everything, too.
She spent her final Fourth of July in bed at her mansion in Malibu. Moses hadn’t spoken to his mother in a year, but Clare, the obsessive assistant, wore him down. When the calls, emails, letters, and morbid texted videos did not work, Clare hunted down his social networks and forced her message through them; when that didn’t work, she showed up at his house near Griffith Park and threatened to smash his dishes until he agreed to pay his mother a visit on her deathbed.
When he arrived at Elsie’s mansion, the nurses were on their lunch break, microwaving glass dishes of food in the kitchen, leaving delicious aromas in their wake, having a conversation together in Spanish. The overall atmosphere in the house was less funereal, more cheerful than Moses expected. Rooms bright with Los Angeles sun, carpets recently vacuumed. Fresh flowers in the vases. Her staff present and pumped with life. Clare led Moses up the stairs, to his mother’s bedroom, saying nothing as they moved. Her hair smelled of mint.
Throughout her life, Elsie had looked and sounded healthier than she was. It was an appearance generated by Botox and every other beauty-boosting chemical known to humankind, plastic surgery, a lifetime of pricey exercise, a private chef, thirty years of leisure, a self-replenishing bank account, and supernatural genes. The enemies of this appearance—substance abuse, insomnia, sun damage, mental illness—were no match for its defendants. She had, through a blend of will and science, bottled her youth.
But now, finally, death had announced itself in Elsie Jane McLoughlin Blitz. In her bedroom, Moses averted his eyes.
“Clare, leave,” said Elsie as though speaking to a Labrador. “To the backyard. Go on. Don’t come back until he’s gone.”
“Okay.” Clare reached over to insert a straw into a smoothie on Elsie’s nightstand.
“Clare.”
She hurried away. “Yes, yes, I’m going. I’m gone.”
Above Elsie’s enormous bed hung an eighteenth-century oil painting of a massacre. The wall opposite the bed featured taxidermy: a whole pheasant, a chukar partridge, a rattlesnake, the heads of bison, buffalo, reindeer, bighorn sheep. A vampire bat. A beaver, looking transgressed.
Her room was too warm, almost foggy. Moses hadn’t set foot in this house for years.
“Don’t touch anything,” croaked Elsie. “Common germs could kill me. Which is comical. You survive the unthinkable for eighty-six years, and then you die from something microscopic—from a cold. I’ll have you know I’m in agony.”
He scratched his skin.
“Stop that. For God’s sake—stop that. You know it sickens me.” She paused and closed her eyes, as though counseling herself. “But I do like your socks.”
He studied them, grateful for the excuse to do so. They were neon yellow.
“I had a dream that you were the bogeyman, can you believe it?” Elsie said. “It was all over the news, in my dream. Breaking news: they finally caught the monster who’s been terrorizing children and the unstable since the dawn of time—and his name is Moses Robert Blitz! In the dream, they didn’t even mention me. Can you believe it? That’s what I found most upsetting. They failed to mention the most interesting thing about you!” She cackled until she coughed. “Just kidding, my darling. Oh, lighten up. You’re so sensitive.”
“This is going well, Mother. Thank you. You’re making me so grateful I drove up here. She forced me to come—your servant. She said you were begging to see me. She said it was all you wanted.”
Elsie cleared her throat. “Well.”
“You have a fucking hysterical way of showing it.”
He aimed one glance at her then looked away, unable to see what he saw. She was bald, bluish, ninety pounds, nonnegotiably mortal. But even when he looked at her, he saw her through a computer raster, a matrix of pixels and scanning lines rendering her unreal. He gripped the nearest object—a standing rack of top hats—to steady himself.
“Don’t touch anything!” Elsie cried. It didn’t seem possible that her feeble body could produce such a sharp, loud noise. “But of course you want to kill your own mother. You dream of it.”
Moses recalled the advice his therapist gave him before this visit: You do not have to tolerate her abuse, she said. Not anymore. If it gets to be too much, you can and should leave.
“I’m going to leave,” Moses announced flatly.
“No!” cried Elsie.
For the first time in his life, Moses glimpsed something like fear in his mother.
“I have exactly five requests,” she whispered.
“I have no obligation to stay here, whether or not you’re in agony. You never stayed when I was in agony.”
Moses, whose attention was fixed on the beaver, mistook Elsie’s ensuing silence for penance, until he heard the slurp. One more glance at her: she was leaning over the bed, wearing a sapphire gown, every bone visible, attempting to suck from the straw. But she lost her balance and knocked the glass on the carpet. A splatter of pulpy green on white.
“Damn,” she muttered.
“I can get Clare,” Moses said through gritted teeth. Unable to dim his biological reaction to this proof of his mother’s suffering, fighting back angry tears, he relocated his attention to the bat. The bat’s mouth was open, exposing four micro-fangs below a walnut nose. It looked ridiculous, its threat in life reduced to a joke in death.
“No,” said Elsie.
“Fine. Tell me your requests. But I have a meeting soon, so—”
Elsie scoffed. He could hear his mother readjusting on the bed, her slow and labored movements, a rustle of sheets, effortful breathing.
“Do you want me to tell Clare to bring you another smoothie?”
“No,” she replied. “I’ll throw it up anyway.”
He closed his eyes. “What is your first request?”
“I want applause at my funeral.”
Of course she did. “Tell that to Clare. You know I’m not organizing it.”
Elsie ignored him. “Second request: I want the reception modeled after one of those harvest festivals in European folklore. I want flamethrowers. Maypoles. Decorated tree trunks. I want bands playing little jigs, and beer, and sausage, and maidens in white, and strapping fellows with ruddy cheeks. Fairies. Witchcraft. Religious judgment. Candy apples. Dancing and proposals and garlands of daisies. Fainting. Sunbeams. Libido—lots of it. In essence, by the end of it all, I want everyone to feel very gratified and sticky.”
“That’s gross.”
“It’s what I want.”
“Fine. I’ll pass it along to Clare.”
“My third request is that you check in on the pygmy three-toed sloths every now and then.”
“Check in on them?”
“Just see how they’re holding up.”
“Mother.”
“I’ve donated a considerable portion of my estate to their preservation, but it might not be enough. Money’s not always enough, you know. I’d feel better if I knew that someone was looking out for them.”
“You actually give a damn?” Moses asked skeptically.
“Of course I do!” Elsie exclaimed.
“Forgive me for assuming it was an act.”
Elsie’s voice lowered, and her words fell slowly. “There’s almost nothing I care about more.”
“Fine,” Moses said, eager to get out of the house. “I’ll check on the fucking sloths. Next request?”
Despite himself, he sensed a palpable shift of energy from his mother’s bed, some unprovable but real change, and when she spoke again, her tone was imbued with decades of sorrow. A rush of vertigo made him stumble.
“Moses,” Elsie whispered. “Avenge yourself against me and my motherhood. Don’t forgive me—that’s my fourth request. Please, never, ever, ever forgive me. My crimes are my only company, in this room. Clare and my crimes. I’ve been thinking long and hard about it, and it’s obvious to me that I don’t deserve clemency, even after I die. Even after you die. I was never able—I don’t know why I was never able to—but I just wasn’t—I couldn’t. Even now, I try, and it doesn’t come to me. Motherhood just doesn’t come to me. I’m looking at you, Moses.” Her voice wavered. “My love. My only. Moses, please.”
Moses scratched his neck, then stopped, remembering that this compulsion upset his mother, then resumed, remembering that his mother upset him, then stopped, because she was dying. Manipulation—she had a PhD in it; she could lock you in the pool house for ten hours and make you feel guilty about it; she could do absolutely everything wrong for five decades and still make you cry at her deathbed.
“And the fifth request?”
“Look at me,” Elsie demanded.
“I’m looking at you, Mom.”
Finally, he was. For the rest of his life, he would consider this the most difficult thing he had ever done. When his eyes met hers, her cratered face split into a smile, splitting him along with it. West-facing windows cast her features into an eerie orange. This view was clear of pixels.
“I’m looking at you, Mom. What’s your fifth request?”
“That was my fifth request.”
“Dorothy the First?” asks Father Tim. “My own mother?”
“Yes. You said you loved her very much.”
“I did, didn’t I.”