Marmot

O

ver the past several months I have felt the presence of my death growing stronger—like an infant who, both quickly and slowly, begins to crawl and then to walk and then to run, and in this way takes on the shape of the life it will live. I can’t remember the exact point where I first began to feel it: of course I have always felt it, the way the prospect of one’s mortality always flashes in one’s mind, particularly at low moments or when danger is near (or maybe even in happy moments, some people are like that). But I’m not talking about the general idea of death, the realization of our finitude that hangs over us like a sword dangling on a string. I mean my highly specific death, the one that will come to take me, to give itself to me. From a distance, if you aren’t concerned with exactitude, all deaths seem more or less the same, as though they can be roughly categorized with broad strokes: car crash, cancer, suicide, poverty and so forth. But if you choose to let curiosity colour your gaze and look closer, you will find that they’re all quite distinct. That, just as we each have our own distinct life, we each have our own distinct death. It’s not that I believe we are assigned to our death in a fatalistic way, marked by it since birth. It’s simply that as we live and give shape to our lives, we simultaneously give shape to our deaths. And somehow, over the last several months, I have come to know which death is the one that awaits me. I’ve felt it drawing closer over time, gaining more urgency, more solidity.

One day, I don’t know when, I will be murdered. And when I am murdered, with my dying breath I will have to forgive the one who has killed me. This is the task that will define my life. That will, in a way, absolve me.

It’s not that I’ve done anything so bad, nothing truly immoral or criminal. But we all need to be absolved somehow: for our bad breath, for snapping at others in frustration, for travelling by airplane, for failing to completely unravel the neuroses our parents gifted us. We need something to wash these things from our consciences, and for me, forgiving my murderer is the act that will fulfill that function. As the weeks have passed and my death has felt as though it is drawing still closer I’ve prepared for it in the best way I can, rehearsing it over and over in my mind: the way I will be stabbed or shot or run over; the murderer towering over me, steely hatred in his (or “her,” or perhaps even “them," I don’t want to presume, although I do prefer to imagine it as “his”) eyes and I look up at him benevolent, practically angelic, glowing through the pain and violence, and I tell him: I forgive you. His face shifts into shock and wonder, his hands on his face, overcome. And I don’t see this next part, being dead, but my forgiving him changes his life completely. He becomes kinder, commits to shifting the defining tenor of his life from cruelty to generosity to try and reach toward the bar that I set with the ultimate generosity that I granted him. And he will never reach that bar, there’s no way to approach that ultimate act of generosity; but we all need impossible goals to aspire toward.

With this commitment to normalcy in mind I have continued to go on dates with people who I meet on the apps, the men and women whom the supposedly-complex-but-ultimately-middling algorithms present to me as suitable matches.

I’ve been imagining this scene repeatedly in order to brace myself to respond with forgiveness when the violence is inflicted upon me. I’m terrified that I won’t be able to do it—that when I’m stabbed or shot or run over with a car I will simply cough out blood and curse and pass on, and I will not be absolved of the frivolous minutiae that constitute my life. But it is imperative that I succeed, and this is a necessity that has been consuming me internally.

Other than my hidden mental changes I’ve been conducting my life as usual: logging in to my email every morning, closing my laptop every evening, going for brisk walks around the neighbourhood, sometimes at lunchtime, when the sun is hanging overhead, sometimes at dusk, when the sky is painted in many different hues, as though it exists only to be regarded with admiration. Because I don’t know precisely when I am going to die, it’s sensible to remain fixed in my routines. With this commitment to normalcy in mind I have continued to go on dates with people who I meet on the apps, the men and women whom the supposedly-complex-but-ultimately-middling algorithms present to me as suitable matches. Which is why there is a man sitting in front of me at this very moment. He is speaking about something, explaining some facet of his work. I haven’t been paying attention because mid-sentence I recalled my rapidly approaching death and reviewed the scene once more, and also because what he was saying was not interesting to me, and I have trouble paying attention to things that aren’t interesting to me. I accept it as a flaw of mine.

The man and I are sitting in a cocktail bar, one of those places where the cocktails are 25 dollars but are actually good, even delectable, and it’s more annoying that the ridiculously priced cocktails are delectable because it’s difficult to be angry about them. The situation just feels slightly depressing, like every situation in which you realize in an immediate way that though some things designed for the wealthy are functionally identical to the lower-priced versions, and seem to exist only as a way to rip off people who have money to throw around, other things designed for the wealthy are actually better.

The cocktail bar is tiny and very dark but in a suave way, not like it is attempting to imitate the atmosphere of a dive bar in a hammy gesture toward “authenticity,” which would have been unbearable. There is a bar counter that winds, serpent-like, through almost the entirety of the room (not maximizing the space very well, but I suppose that’s the point, to reject the sensible utilization of available space and create something less reasonable). My date and I are sitting at the bar on stools, half-facing each other, and when I tune back in to his voice he’s saying the system we use for it is outdated, to be honest, and I’ve been trying to get them to switch to the software that all our competitors use, but in a company of this size making any decision takes forever. I nod, trying to look engaged, but he seems to realize that I haven’t been paying attention and trails off, studying my face, then fishing his phone from his pocket and glancing at it. Well, it’s a bit late, I think I’d better head home.

He says this somewhat suddenly, but we’ve been at the bar for an hour, maybe even an hour and a half, a reasonable amount of time for a first date. He calls over the bartender and asks to pay, giving her his card (not even shooting me a prying glance to gauge whether I would want to split the bill, or argue over who will pay the bill, or at least put up an appearance of arguing over who will pay the bill; not being curious in the least as to my preference, not consulting me even perfunctorily, as though it were the least debatable thing in the world, and I’m not offended by it per se but feel that I perhaps should be). After paying the bill he starts to say goodbye and I tell him to wait a second. I pull out my phone, leaning into him and angling the better side of my face toward the front-facing camera. The white flash of the screen lights up the bar. Ah, he says, squinting at me, alright, sure. He gathers his coat and leaves.

I wave the bartender back over and ask for another outlandish cocktail, doing it quickly, before I have a chance to visualize the amount being deducted from my bank balance to be literally swallowed by me. If I had thought about it I would never have ordered the cocktail, but I find it thrilling to make purchases impulsively. It makes me feel like I am completely losing control of myself, falling vertiginously into some void of utter hedonism. Even if it is only a purchase to the tune of 25 dollars, which in the end is more or less frivolous, I won’t feel the loss. What matters is the feeling of the abandonment of control, regardless of the material reality.

When it’s a singular date I’m able to imagine what it could have been like to be in a relationship with the person: I can study the photo of us together, looking at the expression on their face, the expression on my face, the language of their posture, of their eyes, of their outfit and their closeness or distance from me, and I can attempt to gauge how our relationship would have fared.

My cocktail arrives and it is a jewel-like shade of purple, served in a tiny bowl atop a tall, thin stem. I take a sip and it is floral and sweet, the alcohol a bit musky but it doesn’t burn the throat (mezcal, I think, but I barely looked at the ingredients, it could be anything). As I sip at the drink I study the photo I took. The flash washes out our features, makes us look strange. His skin appears very pale, even ghostly, and printed on his face is an expression of dull surprise. The stubble of his beard looks kind of dirty against his jawline, which I hadn’t noticed in the darkness of the bar. His shoulders are tensed, almost imperceptibly so; I zoom in on them, and then on his jawline, and then on his eyes, trying to see if I can read anything in them, any clue to his emotional state, to how he feels about me, to the viability of a relationship between us. I’m not able to see anything at all. I add the picture to an album of photos of me and other men and women on first dates, then start to scroll through them. There are about 30, all taken over the last three years, before which I wasn’t really “dating” unless you want to count a girl I would make out with on lunch break in the trash-filled creek by our high school, pretty much every day for two or three months. But we were never officially dating, and when she one day texted me asking if I wanted to go for dinner with her that weekend at the bland family restaurant in the suburb we lived in (which would sell alcohol to minors if you put on some makeup and dressed smartly and basically made an effort), I didn’t reply to her. We stopped making out by the creek and began to pass each other in the hallway wordlessly, as though nothing had happened, and nothing really had happened.

There is no photo of me and her in the album, obviously. All of the pictures were taken with people whom I met on the apps, and I went out with almost all of them just once. There are various reasons why I didn’t continue to see the people in those photos, the central one being that I only wanted to go on the first date. The few occasions where I saw some of the people two or three times only came about due to my eventual caving to their repeated insistence. It’s not that I am strongly opposed to going on multiple dates, I would do it if it was necessary (and have indeed done it when it was necessary, as I mentioned). I just prefer to go on the one date. When it’s a singular date I’m able to imagine what it could have been like to be in a relationship with the person: I can study the photo of us together, looking at the expression on their face, the expression on my face, the language of their posture, of their eyes, of their outfit and their closeness or distance from me, and I can attempt to gauge how our relationship would have fared. Of course there’s no way to really know. It’s an exercise in fantasy, in interpretation and speculation.

I compare the photo I’d just taken of me and my date to another one, taken about six months prior, with a man who looked superficially similar, and who also spent the date telling me about his job at a very similar cocktail bar. Now that I’m looking at the photo I find that it is actually the exact same cocktail bar, and when I zoom in on my glass it looks as though I had even been drinking the exact same cocktail, which I hadn’t remembered trying before. Between the date tonight and the one several months ago, though the environmental conditions were the same and the men bore a passing resemblance, the language of the photos are completely different. In the older one the man is sitting with his body turned subtly toward me, looking engaged, a hint of a smirk beginning to turn up his mouth. I recall receiving a text from him shortly after our date ended, and when I scroll through my messaging app I find it: ciao bella ;-) had a great time tonight … hope to see you soon. I never replied. Comparing that photo against the one I took tonight, it seems clear which relationship would’ve had a better chance of succeeding. But who knows: I wonder if the more engaged man would have started to bore me over time with his attentiveness, if I wouldn’t prefer someone who was a bit less forthcoming with their affection. Who would make me work for it, so that the when I finally got it I felt like I deserved it.

When I brush my thumb against the screen to scroll through the gallery, the next photo isn’t of another date. It’s a tastefully composed picture, probably taken by an amateur wildlife photographer, of an autumnal pasture, large trees lining the edges of a field peppered with fallen red and orange leaves. And in the middle, artistically slightly off-centre: a marmot, one of those large, dirty-brown rodents ubiquitous in this city and particularly on the mountain at its centre. The marmot in the photo is sitting aimless and globular with its empty eyes fixed on some point outside the frame in a manner that appears almost contemplative. There’s nothing particularly interesting to me about the animal, although I must have screenshot the picture from a social media app at some point, for reasons that now evade me. I pinch the screen to zoom in on the rodent’s beady-eyed, bucktoothed expression, then put the phone to sleep and slide it back into my pocket.

The bartender comes over and asks if I want another cocktail. I think about it for a moment, and the decision is made; I could only have had another one if I’d said yes right after being asked. She takes away the empty glass and brings me the terminal to smack my card against. When I stand up I find that I’m quite drunk. Outside it is a warm evening, and the street is filled with groups of young people standing around on the sidewalk, waiting in line for clubs, waiting for cars to come pick them up, waiting for friends to stop puking in alleyways and all of their eyes, which I try my best to avoid, are glassy and wet and slightly shimmering like the gnat-disturbed surfaces of shallow ravines. I decide to go for a walk up the mountain, which we call a mountain but which is really more like a very large hill—I don’t mean that in a demeaning way, I just feel that “mountain” conjures up a specific image that has a tenuous relationship to the topographical feature of our city that we call a mountain. It isn’t even a natural landform, it was created only a hundred years ago by human hands (to be specific, by machines controlled by human hands) as a creative way to get rid of some millions of tons of garbage and industrial waste that city officials wanted out of sight. They ripped a bunch of dirt and rocks out of other parts of the city where they were putting in tunnels for the metro, and piled it all on top of the former garbage site, planting a bunch of maple seedlings on it that somehow ended up growing into decent-looking trees.

There is a winding gravel road for pedestrians that encircles the mountain like a ribbon around a ballerina’s calf, and the start of the path is close to the busy street where there are many popular clubs and restaurants and young people like to mingle on the sidewalk and fight with one another, and where the bar with the delicious expensive cocktails is.

Surprisingly it all looks fine, basically indistinguishable from any other very large hill in the world, although apparently there have been issues related to environmental pollution and public health stemming from the noxious gases rising up from the hundred-year-old decomposing garbage and industrial waste beneath the mountain. Municipal politicians have been engaged in debates for a couple of years on how to remedy the issues. There’s even an ongoing case against the city recently filed by residents who live on top of the former garbage site, because it seems like the city forgot that the garbage was there until a few years ago, and had been letting people build houses on top of it without saying anything, and now all the people who built houses on top of the decomposing garbage and industrial waste are at risk of developing certain health conditions, maybe even currently experiencing certain health conditions.

Despite it all I have a fondness for the mountain. It is pleasant to walk up it at any time of the day without exerting yourself too much, without pouring with sweat and straining your leg muscles and without needing to change your clothes. You can decide on a whim I feel like going up the mountain right now, and then go right up. I do that all the time. There is a winding gravel road for pedestrians that encircles the mountain like a ribbon around a ballerina’s calf, and the start of the path is close to the busy street where there are many popular clubs and restaurants and young people like to mingle on the sidewalk and fight with one another, and where the bar with the delicious expensive cocktails is.

It only takes me a few minutes to walk from the cocktail bar to the path, and then I begin my ascent. It is darker and cooler on the mountain than it had been on the street, and the foliage of the maple trees is rich and lush around me, nearly covering the sky. Inside the foliage are a million insects buzzing and chittering and flying about, little specks moving rapidly against the air. Though it is a beautiful summer’s evening for some reason there isn’t anyone else around—and the thought slinks into my head that this is the perfect time for my death to come to me. I begin envisioning it, to prepare myself, but the road is becoming darker and darker as the sun sets, and the anticipation in combination with my drunkenness and the gradual dimming of the light is making me see things: the outline of a man appears in the dark shadows within the leaves and branches, but a moment later it turns out to be nothing, just a trick of the light. I’m getting so worked up with expectation and anxiety that if someone really does jump out at me and kill me I’m not going to be able to respond with forgiveness. I try to cast the thoughts of death from my mind and relax, hoping that if something does happen I’ll have already prepared enough that I’ll be able to fulfill my part, it will be automatic, like riding a bike, as they say.

I’m already almost halfway up the mountain, near where there is a kind of ledge which gives a decent view of the city. If you go to the very top there is a better lookout point but it requires a lot more effort to reach, and I’m beginning to feel thirsty and grimy from the alcohol and just want to reach the halfway point before turning around and going home. I glance at my phone and see that there aren’t any messages from my date telling me he had a great time and he’d like to see me again, which doesn’t surprise me, given his body language in the photo I took of us.

The marmot is incomprehensible to me, its nature locked away from my understanding, and yet we reach out toward one another in our own ways. We weave together our fragile coexistence, delicately, in a space beyond language.

When I put my phone away and look up I notice, almost directly in the centre of the path before me, beside the small clearing where you can sit on the grass and look out over the city, an animal sitting motionless. A fat marmot, about the size of a large cat, or even a corgi, although significantly less well-groomed than such creatures, and closer in appearance to an overgrown, tailless rat—which isn’t meant as an insult, that’s simply what it looks like.

The marmot is sitting (standing?) with its four little legs tucked underneath its fuzzy body, so that all I can see of them are the long black nails. The rodent is so perfectly elliptical, and practically featureless, covered in its beige-brown fur, that it is just a crude shape. As though it understands what I’m thinking and wants to challenge me, the marmot suddenly stretches itself upright, standing on its back legs. Stood up on its back legs, its rudimentary silhouette actually become even more pronounced, because it stands straight up with its arms (front legs?) down at its sides, and its back legs tucked under its butt, which sits flush against the ground. The marmot continues to resemble a nearly perfect oval, only vertical, like an oval that has rotated itself ninety degrees on a hinge.

I approach the animal, careful not to make a sound or move too quickly, until I’m standing a couple of feet away. Despite our nearness the marmot continues to pay me no mind, the lightless eyes in the sides of its face as unconcerned as a pair of cheap marbles. In front of us the landscape of our city is laid out in an imperfect grid below the mountain, the bright lights of all the buildings and streets extending far back into the horizon, and the sky hanging over it now completely dark. Standing quietly beside the marmot looking over the city something rises in me, a rare sentimental emotion. I feel something in myself soften slightly toward the unsophisticated creature. The marmot is incomprehensible to me, its nature locked away from my understanding, and yet we reach out toward one another in our own ways. We weave together our fragile coexistence, delicately, in a space beyond language. The marmot suddenly flips itself horizontal again and scampers off, its fat body jiggling as it slides into the foliage and disappears.

And then I hear what made it scamper off. I hear the rapidly approaching footsteps coming from behind me, slamming heavily into the road, heading directly for me. And then I hear the man’s breathing, a feral, ragged sound scraping through the air. All of it barrelling toward me: my death coming, finally, to take me, to give itself to me.

Here is what I have been waiting for, the event that has been giving shape to itself slowly and then quickly over the past several months—no, not just over the past several months, but indeed over the course of my entire life. Even before I began to feel the contours of its expression sharpening it had surely been there, quietly formulating itself. Now that it is finally here my reality crumbles, so that the event simultaneously feels as though it is happening and already past, my sense of time and casualty warping, and it is inevitable that he will kill me, in fact it has already been done, yet I cannot detach myself fully from a sense of protection over my own life. My body floods with adrenaline and I fear that I’m going to be sick, that I’m going to yelp and throw up, but no, no—I won’t. I won’t because I know what I’m supposed to do, because all of my life has been leading to this specific moment and I am prepared to meet it as it approaches me. I know exactly how to meet it with the grace I have been training to embody and as his footsteps and his breathing and his hot feral body barrel unstoppably toward me, as the murderer comes within inches of me, I whip myself around and purge the fear from my face, I make my face a mask of saintly goodwill, and the language that leaves my mouth is less a collection of words than an expression of pure, nearly inhuman benediction as I tell him, looking directly into his delirious eyes: I forgive you.

The man stops in his tracks. Huh? There is no weapon in his hand, no knife or gun or hideous rusty hammer in his sweating grip. He reaches to his ear and removes an AirPod. What’d you say? You need something, sweetheart? Then his face shifts into surprise and he grins, not in a wholly pleased way but with a tinge of awkward politeness, so that it is halfway between a grimace and a grin. Oh, hey, how you doin? Instead of my murderer it is the man I went out with six months prior, the one with a superficial resemblance to tonight’s date. I stand there staring at him, not saying a word, my arms shaking a little from the adrenaline. He looks back at me, confusion gradually filling his face like air hissing into a balloon, and tries again, still smiling: Taking a nice night stroll, are ya? I continue to gaze at him wordlessly, feeling my eyes bulging out of my face. He opens his mouth to say something else then drops his gaze, scratching the back of his hand and nodding slowly. Well, I gotta continue my run, he gestures to the path and puts his AirPod back in. Take care, sweetheart!

He runs off down the road at a steady, quick pace, his feet slapping lightly against the gravel, until he disappears into the dark, until he leaves me alone in the quiet once more, with the foliage around me and the lights of the city below me and the night sky above me. I stand there in shock, without a thought in my head. Five or ten minutes go by, and then I notice that the mosquitoes have started to bite at me in earnest—I can feel the beginnings of the itchy welts that will soon start rising on my bare arms and legs. I decide that it is time to go home. And what happens after I make this decision is that the mountain, the really large hill in the centre of our city that we call a mountain, the mountain that had been built atop some millions of tons of garbage and industrial waste, the mountain that has been causing certain health problems in the local populace due to the buildup of toxic gases from the decomposition of the hundred-year-old materials underground, begins to violently shake and quake, making me lose my balance, and then it explodes.

As I mentioned earlier, the city has been engaged in discussions for a couple of years about how to solve the problems arising from the decomposition of the garbage and industrial waste that the mountain was built on top of, and the local government has been holding long, complex debates, both internally and in public consultations, that have not yet resulted in any concrete plans being set out to solve the issue. City officials have been firm that the problem needs to be remedied, that the environmental pollution is accumulating, that the health risks faced by the local population are unacceptable. It has been a serious local issue, surfacing frequently in our city’s papers over the past couple years, both in the form of reports and journalistic investigations, as well as in opinion articles, where writers of varied political persuasions have put forward either obvious or stupidly reactionary criticisms of the city and its inability to solve the problem with haste. Our mayor secured her re-election last fall after campaigning on a platform in which the resolution of the garbage-mountain issue had particular emphasis.

It could actually not be a marmot at all, since all I see is a kind of marmot-shaped beige-brown splotch in the dark, being rocketed through the air, with the beautiful nighttime landscape of the city behind it, the constellation of electric lights glowing like votive candles at a well-attended mass.

And yet, despite all this, it had been my understanding, and I assume the general understanding, being that the mountain has continued to be open to the public as normal, that though the issue is in some ways urgent and time-sensitive, it wasn’t immediately dangerous to be on the mountain. Certainly not that the mountain was liable to explode at any moment. Perhaps the city hadn’t realized the immediate danger of the situation either; it had forgotten about the garbage underneath the mountain for nearly a hundred years in the first place.

As I’m launched in the air by the explosion the shock completely disorients me, and then, a second later, as I come to some sort of dazed half-realization of what’s happening, the smell reaches me: the horrible odor of the noxious gases that have built up from the decomposition of the hundred-year-old garbage and industrial waste sequestered underground, and it is by far the most offensive scent that I’ve ever come across in my life. So powerful that, in combination with the fear and shock of being thrust into the air, it makes me lose consciousness.

But just before I lose consciousness, I see, for a second, that the marmot from earlier is in the air with me, having been launched by the explosion of the mountain as well. I suppose it could be a different marmot entirely, it’s not like I would be able to tell them apart. It could actually not be a marmot at all, since all I see is a kind of marmot-shaped beige-brown splotch in the dark, being rocketed through the air, with the beautiful nighttime landscape of the city behind it, the constellation of electric lights glowing like votive candles at a well-attended mass. Let’s forgive each other, I think toward the marmot, let’s forgive each other, quickly, for everything we’ve ever done. I’m sure that the marmot-like shape blinks in consent. It could surely be a clump of mud or a stout piece of log, but for me, in that split-second, it is my marmot. My friend, my marmot, my deliverance.