The Last Days of My Mother by Sölvi Björn Sigurdsson Page A

myself, but when a single man escorts you to a museum and offers you some hash-jazz you really can’t turn them down.”
    She added that she felt a certain empathy and closeness in the company of a dying person. She and Tim shared something that I unfortunately—or rather fortunately, perhaps—could not understand, and even though she had every intention of beating the illness, she felt there was something remarkable in meeting Timothy Wallace, a cancer patient from Missouri, and to share with him a certain fate. I smiled at the man and looked for coded signs in his face asking to be rescued from this situation, but he seemed to be enjoying it and told me he would try to keep Mother out of trouble.
    We said our good-byes, and after walking a few times around the alleyways of Warmoerstraat I found the Cannabis Museum in a low building on the corner of Pijlsteeg. Before I got to the door, a large group of Mexicans piled in and I ended up at the back of a long, slow line in the dimly lit entrance. The lighting reminded me of Daniel, my former colleague, strangely gray and diluted,yet persistent. To heighten my torment, Céline Dion’s face filled a screen in my line of sight with the accompanying sinking-ship-music blasting from the speakers overhead.
    â€œSix-fifty,” the girl at the ticket desk said, handing me a ticket.
    â€œI’m here to see Steven Turtleman,” I said. “Please let him know that I’m here.”
    She didn’t react at all, just stared at me through a month’s buildup of make-up and then finally pointed to the bandage on my temple and asked if I’d been in a fight. I explained to her that apparently my face was an appealing destination for fungi and repeated that I wanted to see Steven. I looked around the lobby while I waited, managed to get tangled up in a display of teas, and stumbled through a side door with a no-entry sign between my legs.
    â€œSir,” the doctor’s son came to my rescue, clamping a steadying hand on my shoulder. He helped me out of the closet and led me through a room with an herb garden and a relief of the Chinese Opium Wars. Our journey ended in an office with red walls, where he took off his jacket and offered me a seat.
    â€œBodySnatch,” he said and held up a small container, “is the only stuff that truly works for burning body fat. You know all these products: Fatodity, Feroxycut, all these countless thieving drugs on the market. Because that’s what this shit does—steals your money and stashes it in some offshore account! But not BodySnatch.” I had no idea where he was going with this so I just sat quietly and let him go on about the merits of the magic in the small container. “You were thinking of thirty boxes,” he said, “I think you should take sixty.”
    â€œYou think she really needs that?” I asked, realizing he might be confusing me with someone else. “I’m Hermann Willyson, Eva Briem’s son. I’m here for the grass.”
    Steven’s insistence gave way to surprise, his jaw hanging half way down his chest as he shuffled through some papers. “Willyson!” he finally exclaimed, realizing with relief that I was not Mr. Bryn Robben from Trim Center, but the man he’d met last Friday by Ramji’s car. “Wow!” he said, “To be honest I’m not so sure that BodySnatch really works, so it’s good that you’re not Mr. Bryn Robben.”
    I asked him what would happen when the real Mr. Robben came knocking and he said he was going to fatten himself up. Retailers of fat burning supplements would be fascinated by the ad campaign he had planned for BodySnatch.
    â€œ Before and after BodySnatch . I’m going to get some after shots done now, then I’ll put on 20-25 pounds and do the before shots. Mr. Bryn Robben won’t be able to resist. He’ll go for sixty boxes.”
    He went on talking about his