A Cure for Suicide (6 page)

Along the stairs there were photographs. At each step there was another photograph. By walking up and down the stairs one could find a sort of history—but of what it was hard to say. There were many photographs of machines. Winged machines, wheeled machines, farm machines. There were many people with somber clothing and blurry faces. Sometimes there were many people together in one photograph, and when there were, they usually all stood facing in the same direction. How could the photographer stand in front of them—so many, and not be noticed?

The banister was of a swooping brown wood and felt very pleasant under the hand. One could run the hand along it, all the way down the stairs, and then one would be at the bottom. All the way from the top to the bottom.

The bottom of the stairs faced a long, narrow hall—and at its end a door that was never open. This door was set with colored glass of every sort. It would be a nice place to lie, to lie flat on the back in the hall and be covered with the colored light.

There were two paintings in this hall—one of a bird with long feathers, and another of a woman who wore clothing that made her look very much like a bird. She was angry, and her face was cruel, and she filled the area around the door with her anger.

Many of the windows in the house had seats in them. The seats were covered in cushions, and a person could sit there as long as they liked. Eventually, the sun might become blinding. Or, the sky would become dark. Then it would be time to go to a different place.

The woman who walked about in the house was very old. She was always watching everything that happened, and always listening. She was a comfort because she would be there in an instant to help, or she would wait for hours until the next time she should be there in an instant to help. She wore dark stockings of wool and no shoes. Her clothes were the same color as the walls.

The kitchen was the airiest room in the house. It had many windows, and they looked out on a garden full of plants. Some things from the garden would end up in the kitchen. There were many times when one could leave the kitchen happily, and one would often come into it with great happiness, too. The kitchen was the best room in the house.

There were many places in the house for putting things. One could put things from one place to another, and they would go back to the place they had been before. This was a sort of game. As many times as one would do it, the things would return. Even paintings that were tilted, or hairs placed under small statues.

The man would get up and go to the stairs at first, and he would wait there, and wait until she came and then they would go down the stairs together. Or, later, he would go down sitting, go down sitting all the way. He had a hard time making his legs and arms work like the old woman could. Whenever she wanted to do something, she did it.

Finally, he could go down the stairs just like her. In fact, he could go down faster than that. He would go down the stairs and the old woman would find him and they would have things to do all day and then it would be time to sleep.

Whenever he didn’t have things to do, the old woman found something for him to do. But when he had something to do, she was never there.

The man liked the pants that he wore, and there was a day when he put all the clothes on by himself and came down the stairs by himself, and worked on a thing he had decided to do by himself and ate by himself and it was not until the evening that he saw her. Then they sat on the closed porch and she lit a candle and it was a sort of celebration.

AND ON THE SEVENTIETH DAY, the man spoke.

—CAN I, the water.

The examiner sat quietly looking at the claimant. She said nothing.

—Can you give me the water?

His words were clear and distinct.

She picked up the pitcher of water with both hands and gravely presented it to him.

—Here you are, she said.

—Thank you, said the claimant.

The examiner nodded and went back to what she had been doing as if nothing remarkable at all had just happened.

SHE DID NOT begin to speak to him until two days had passed. Until then, she would answer him when he spoke, and speak to confirm the sense of what he had done.

But, when she began, she spoke with full diction and clarity.

—I am the examiner, she said. It is my purpose to help you. I have no purpose but that. I live here in this house. This house is the place where you live. We live in this house together. We are together in completing something. The thing that we are completing is your recovery. You were very sick. You were totally incapacitated by an illness. You almost died. When you were on the point of death, you were rescued, and now you are being brought back to health. There is every reason to have real optimism about your chances. I feel certain that things will go well for you, and though you do not know what lies ahead, you may rely on me.

—Where…

He swallowed.

—Where are we?

—We are in the house where we live. Where else would we be? How could it be possible to be anywhere else but where we are? How silly.

—How do you know me?

—I am the person who knows you. I am the only one. And you, you know me. We create a world through that, through knowing one another. You need not worry yourself about that. We have this house that we live in, and in it we do the things we need to do to live. We cook and eat, we clean ourselves, we practice our tasks. You will have many tasks to learn and do.

—I feel, I feel very sad.

—It isn’t sadness that you feel. Sadness is a feeling of loss. There is something one wanted, and one doesn’t have it—or there is a way one wanted things to be, and things aren’t that way. That is sadness. Instead, you feel rootlessness. You have not attached yourself to the things around you. By doing so, you will find that your happiness can grow.

She led him over to a wall.

—Let us begin here. What do you see?

—Two, two…

—Pictures. They are called pictures. But you knew that. You know many words. They will return to you soon enough. Let us try—what is the top one called? What sort of picture is it?

—A painting.

—That’s right. And the bottom one?

—A picture.

—It is a picture, but what sort?

—A photograph.

—That’s right. Tell me about these pictures.

The man looked at the pictures for a very long time. After he had done so, he went and sat back down in the dining room with his head in his hands. The old woman followed him and sat beside him, with one hand on his shoulder. The rest of the day, they spoke very little, and whenever he looked up, her eyes were there, hard upon his, full of reassurance and strength.

THE NEXT DAY, she led him back to that wall.

—Tell me about these pictures, she said.

He looked at them and looked at them. Then he went into the dining room. There was a pad of paper there, and a pen. The old woman had left it there, in the middle of the table, and said nothing about it.

The man took the pad and began to draw. He drew and drew. An hour passed. He looked up. He had done a very rudimentary drawing of a farmhand feeding some chickens. With some difficulty one could perceive that that is what it was.

The old woman came over.

—Very good, she said, very good. I think…

She went into the kitchen and then came again and stood by him.

—In fact, I am sure of it. I like yours more. Sometimes sketches of things are to be preferred to paintings. I find that I often prefer artists’ sketchbooks. Such books are like this—

She drew a notebook from the wall, a loose leather fold with blank paper stitched into it. A pencil was tied to a string that hung from the side.

—You can have this one, she said. Draw in it as much as you like.

He took the book under his arm and sat intently in the chair, looking at nothing insomuch as he was looking at anything.

ONE DAY, the claimant began to write things down. He wrote things on the paper in between his drawings. The writing was not involved. He would write, This is a drawing, or, This is an idea for a drawing, or, A dog, or, The third one like this. Whenever he used the paper, he tore it out of the notebook and put it in a pile. The examiner never read any of his writing while he was awake, but in the night, she went through the pile of his drawings, very slowly and meticulously, missing nothing.

From these drawings, she learned many things. For instance, he had been in a gentlest village before. This did not surprise her in the slightest.

I wonder, she thought, which of my fellow examiners dealt with him?

Of course, she did not know all of the examiners. In fact, she knew but a tiny sliver of the total number. And if the news was to be believed, the Process of Villages was growing all the time. Soon, it would be everywhere.

She sat at the table, turning over the drawings one at a time. There was a drawing of a tower, and of a bird. These were imitations from children’s books she had shown him. In her mind’s eye she could see the originals.

But here was one she had not seen. It was a drawing of a room, and in the room there was a bed. It looked almost like a coffin. A woman lay in it, with her eyes shut and her hands folded. He had crossed out the woman repeatedly, but she could still be made out.

The old woman flipped through the sheets from the previous day. Another—the same image, with the woman crossed out. Another, and another, and another. He had been drawing all afternoon. All afternoon, he had drawn this same scene and crossed it out. There was no text with any of these.

She put the drawings back exactly where they had been and went upstairs to write her report.

—SOMETIMES I WILL TELL YOU STORIES, said the examiner. They may be full of things that you do not understand. That is not important. It isn’t important that you understand what I say. What’s important is that you behave as a human being should when someone is telling a story. So, listen properly, make noises at appropriate times, and enjoy the fact that I am speaking to you. If it is your turn to tell a story, remember that it is not very important that you are understood as long as you give the person the happiness of being told a story, and of being near you while listening to a story. Much of the speech we do is largely meaningless and is just meant to communicate and validate small emotional contracts. Are you ready?

The claimant waited to see if she was done talking and then he nodded slowly.

—We shall go for a walk and during the walk I will suddenly begin a story. Will you know how to act?

—We shall go for a walk, she repeated. During the walk, I will suddenly begin a story. Will you know how to act?

—WHEN I WAS A YOUNG WOMAN, she said to the claimant, I lived a very wild life.

He sat beside her in the square at the center of the town. There was a carousel, and they sat on its edge, leaning on the poles from which rose the horses, the carriages, the leaping fish.

—Oh, I could tell you, she said, a story or two from that time. I had an old uncle who had fought in a war. Did we speak about that? People killing each other for land or money? Yes? War. Anyway, this was before the republic, so there were still wars. He said he and his fellow soldiers were set to guard a road. So, that is—anyone who came down the road was to be killed. They had tools, guns, with which to do it. Well, there was a general who was trying to escape the province. Apparently he had been hemmed in, and was surrounded. They were intent on capturing him. Anyway, they were sitting there at the crossroads, and it was a hot day, and they were feeling a bit sleepy, and a man comes down the road out of the distance, a fiddler, playing away as he walks. He comes right up to them, a real ragamuffin, and plays for them awhile. Then off he goes on up the road. Thing is—the next day, the orders come down for the general’s capture, and they include a picture of him. Guess what?

The old woman slapped her leg.

—The fiddler was the general. He had put on some old clothes and used a musical talent everyone had forgotten he had. Thing is—my uncle and his fellow soldiers were petrified. They figured the news of his escape would come out and they’d all be court-martialed. But it didn’t happen that way.

—How did it happen?

—How did what happen?

—Things—how did they go?

—Oh, ha, well, no one ever heard of the general again. So, here’s my opinion. I think the general found out that it was a better life being an itinerant fiddler than it was being a general, and I think he didn’t want to go back.

The claimant thought about that for a while.

—Anyway, said the old woman, I always consider that, I always do, whenever I try out a new role, or put on some costume, even if it’s just a new way of thinking about something. There are some doors—when you go through them, they close behind you.

In the square, it was becoming dark. The claimant liked the carousel, and so, he and the examiner would go there every evening. Every afternoon when the sun was by the trees, they would walk down, and they would sit there talking until the lights were on in all the houses and the street lamps were pulsing. Then they would walk back along the street and look into the houses. Sometimes they would see people inside, and they would talk about them, and about how their lives seemed.

The claimant had been surprised to see that there was only ever one person in any given house. None of the people ever went beyond the fence that surrounded each house, and he never saw them speaking or calling out. The examiner said that it was natural. There are people, she said, who require no more than that it rains sometimes.

He asked her if it was like this everywhere. To that, she replied, where is this everywhere? And when he had been quiet for a while, she said, there are many places where people live together with other people. It is to a place like that—it’s to such a place you are headed.

ONE DAY, the examiner came into the claimant’s room as he was turning down the lamp.

—Shall I tell you about tomorrow, she asked.

—Please.

—Tomorrow we will wake. You will wake and I will wake. You will dress and I will dress. We will convene downstairs in the kitchen, and whoever is there first will put the kettle on to boil. We will sit and listen for the kettle, and make tea, and have some small breakfast. Then we will go out on the porch, where a great business will occur. Tomorrow, we shall speak about names.