A Cure for Suicide (19 page)

That it could have happened—this dreadful thing, that I could have kept on sleeping while she was dying, and not noticed, not woken up, I felt a momentary hope in it. It couldn’t be true, and if it wasn’t true, then maybe she was still alive. But she was not alive. I thought of the condition of our night’s sleep and her passing. Maybe she had even tried to wake me. She must have. She who was so perceptive, it could be, it could have been that she had noticed her own death approaching and that she had tried to wake me to speak some final thing into my ear, and that I, instead of waking, instead of acceding to her very last wish, had kept on sleeping, dumbly, vacantly, sleeping on, so I told the interlocutor. He handed me another cloth, and when he did so, our hands touched and he pressed my arm with his other hand. She did not believe, I thought at the time, I told him, that she was going to die. But now, I believe, I said to the interlocutor, that she knew all along, and that she didn’t tell me in order to give us the maximum possible time of happiness. If it could be that our last days were spent weeping and carrying on—they would simply have been a blur. They would have bled into one another. She was stronger than that, and her strength manifested in this way: she would not tell me, did not tell me, and we instead spent the time planning a life that we could never live. Where she was in the bed, curled against me, one leg actually wrapped around a leg of mine—it hurt my heart to feel and see it. It was clear that while dying she had clung to me, had pushed as close as physically possible. And all this while I slept, insensible. I lay there for hours, not moving, actually afraid to move at all, and I felt that I wished I could not move. But, eventually I rose. I straightened her out, and laid her hands across her body. I shut her eyes, and pulled a blanket partway up over her legs. Then, I felt strange about it, and pulled the blanket down. I looked at her, there in her nightgown, and I cried and didn’t know what to do. So, I dressed her in some of her clothes, what clothes I could fit over her, and then I went to the telephone and called her parents. Although I did not want to, I did it, I told the interlocutor. I called her parents, and her mother answered the phone. She recognized me, and the first thing she said, in a terrible voice, was, where are you. I said, I need to tell you something, and she said, you don’t tell me anything. Where are you, that’s all. I told her where I was, and she hung up. That same day, they must have driven for fourteen hours straight, her parents arrived with others, and they took her away. They took me back to the city, and actually dropped me off at the outskirts. They did not want to take me into the city. There was a feeling, I came to understand, that I was to blame. No one said, she would have lived longer, but I knew that they felt, every last one, that I did not deserve to have her last week to myself. They had never understood why she had taken up with me. They understood it completely, why she had been able to be so free with me—that my not knowing about her death was the whole of it. But why it should have been me, it was actually unfathomable. I was special merely because of my ignorance. That was what she had seen in me, so they thought. Her father said to me, get out of the car, please, and pulled up at the curb. I got out, and the car sped away. It had stopped for the briefest moment, and then it sped away again. I was deep in my thoughts, in the backseat of the car, and then I was watching as the car drove off. In the car, as we drove in the car, I noticed that her parents spoke with the mountain accent. It was apparent to me as I heard them speaking, as it had not been apparent to me at our previous meetings. We had been driving, all the way back, straight, fourteen hours again, with her body in the car, laid out in a coffin. The car had been turned into a sort of impromptu hearse, so I told the interlocutor, and I listened to them speak, and they said things pertaining to her treatment. They grieved in a very plain way with one another, there in the car, in my hearing. My presence was a difficulty for them, and they overcame it by simply believing that I was less than nothing. Always, one would begin to say things, to make regrets about her treatment, or the decisions that they had made in recent months, and then the other one, whichever one had not spoken, would cut in and say, enough of that. It is useless. And then twenty minutes or an hour would pass, and the very one, the same one who had said that it was useless to speak so, would begin to say again, but I think we could have sent her to this hospice, or perhaps that doctor could have done more…and the first one would interrupt, saying, it is useless. There is no use to speaking like that. And all the while I felt that, although I was in the car, although she was in the back of the car that I was traveling in and we were riding along mountain roads back toward the city, I still felt, surely and completely, that I was lying in the bed in the house with her wrapped about me. I felt that more than anything I wanted that immediate feeling to overwhelm me: the sense that she was totally and endlessly wrapped about me. And simultaneous to that, I could see, as if from above, the room in which I had set her, and the place where she lay, with her hands folded, and her face looking up at the ceiling, straight up, through the ceiling. I was standing on the side of the street, some street I had never been on, at the outskirts of the city, and I sat down. I didn’t even go to the curb, I just sat in the street. I was wearied, completely wearied.

When it became dark, I walked to my house, and I found that a note had been left there. The mother had written a note, and the note explained there was to be a funeral. The funeral for Rana was set, and the note explained that it was a very small funeral. There would be people there, but what was meant by very small funeral was that I was not to come. I was not welcome at the funeral, I told the interlocutor. I gave myself up entirely to tears there, before the interlocutor, and I wept outright. He was totally silent, watching, and then he spoke. I don’t know how much time passed, or had passed, as we sat there, all the while that we sat there. When did all of this take place? he asked. And the funeral, when did the funeral happen? It has been going on, I said, these hours while we sat here. It is probably finished now. The interlocutor inclined his head and said quietly, then she has had two funerals, I think, and one of them has been here, in your speaking. You have spoken long, and given her a funeral of sorts, and I have also been in attendance. I have been a witness there, a witness of a kind. I wiped at my face with the cloth he had given me, and sat inertly in the chair. He sat, waiting. I said, finally, I don’t want to live anymore. Then, he took from his desk a piece of paper, encased in lines—a formal piece of paper. He handed me a pen. I didn’t read the paper. I found its outline on the desk, and he pointed to where I should sign and I signed it. I wrote, Clement Mayer, on the sheet, and he took the sheet. He put the sheet into a metal box on the wall. Then he took out of his desk a little brown case. He opened it and removed a single yellow slip. The paper was very finely grained. He handed it to me. He said, this is how it will be. These will be sent where they need to go. They do not now have your name. These are not the ones that will be sent. The ones that will be sent will be exactly like these, save that they will bear your name. The paper will be of the same weight and color and grain. I held the yellow slip and felt it between my fingers. He took another box out of the desk and opened it. This drawer he had to unlock with a key. He did so, using a key that was on a cord around his wrist, like a watch. He took the box out and set it beside the desk on a short table. He knelt by the little table, on one knee, and all his motions became sharply practiced. There was a little bottle, and a syringe. There was a rubber cord. He manipulated them, set them carefully by. He asked me to pull my sleeve up. I drew my sleeve up. He paused. I will tell you something, he said. I always say this last. I believe it is a comfort, and so I say it last, said the interlocutor. He knelt, holding a needle in his hand, and he said, a quote from the founder, Groebden,
Everyone wants life—everyone wants as much life as they can get, and as bright a life.
He is reported to have said that, the great man himself. It is often misinterpreted. He was not saying this was the case, that
everyone actually wants life,
you yourself know that’s not true, but rather that it should be. If animals excel us, defeat us in one thing, it is this: they all want their lives. Life is given to each one of them separately, and they all want it. We do not. And why? Your life has been made up of chambers, a series of chambers, so the interlocutor said, his hand on my arm—and in each chamber it is difficult to remember exactly what it was like to be in the previous room. You can remember that certain things happened when you were a child. But, what it was like to be there, to be a child, it really is lost to you. Our world is a difficult succession of losses, vaguely remembered, vaguely enshrined. The Process of Villages has improved upon it. I say this to you, the Process of Villages is also a world. It is an improvement on the world. It is a house, a series of houses, a system of many series of houses. That which is essential about human habitation and human nature has been boiled down to its core, and repeated until the proportions are exact. In these places, you will slowly get better. I promise you that. There will be people there who will love you, and people who will deceive you. There will be people who struggle on your behalf, people you will never know. All of this has been set in motion long ago. But, it is only now, at the very last, that you go to join it. You can imagine it that way—there are people whose entire purpose is to help you, just you, and only now do you go to join them.

Come, now, incline your chair at this angle, please. I drew my chair over. Your arm, now. He tied the rubber cord around my bicep. He drew the liquid into the needle, and set the needle against my arm. I waited to feel it, waited, but I didn’t feel it go in. We’re done, said the interlocutor. He unbound the rubber cord, and helped me to my feet. Two men, orderlies, came in the room. I was dizzy. He nodded to them, and they helped me along, one on each side. We went out into the hall, ponderously through the doorway. My feet were under me and it felt strange. I felt that I was standing on the sides of my feet. I could feel my weight in my ankles, but nowhere else. I had been sitting so long, and now I was standing, standing outside of the office. The corridor was long. It seemed to go on endlessly, and where it went, the end was invisible. It was completely dark at the end. Back the other way, where I had come from, was there light? Where the building entrance was, there must be light. I couldn’t remember anymore which direction was which. The way we were going, I could make out nothing. The orderlies must know the way, I thought. They walked surely, surefootedly, one on each side, supporting me, their powerful hands gripping me, holding me up as we walked, on down the hallway, on and on, on and on, into the darkness.

the

train

was

traveling

THE TRAIN WAS TRAVELING on a line of track stretched like black thread through the waste. It rattled and rode the line uneasily, its wheels crying out now and then as if goaded. The train was mostly empty.