The Suicide Club

by Toni Graham

  THE SUICIDE CLUB

  THE SUICIDE CLUB

  STORIES BY Toni Graham

  The University of Georgia Press

  Athens and London

  © 2015 by the University of Georgia Press

  Athens, Georgia 30602

  www.ugapress.org

  All rights reserved

  Designed by Kaelin Chappell Broaddus

  Set in by 10.5 /14 Filosofia Regular

  Printed and bound by Sheridan Books, Inc.

  The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

  Printed in the United States of America

  15 16 17 18 19 C 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Graham, Toni, 1945–

  [Short stories. Selections]

  The suicide club : stories / Toni Graham.

  pages ; cm. —

  (Winner of the Flannery O’Connor award for short fiction)

  ISBN 978-0-8203-4850-6 (hardcover : acid-free paper) —

  ISBN 978-0-8203-4851-3 (ebook)

  1. Suicide—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3557.R2234A6 2015

  813’.54—dc23

  2014047206

  British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

  It is preferable not to travel with a dead man.

  HENRI MICHAUX

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  God’s Playground

  Hope Springs

  The Suicide Club

  Belvedere

  FUBAR

  Drop Zone

  Burglar

  Ash

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To my Avila siblings, Cathy, Paul, and Joan

  With many thanks to:

  Jon Billman

  Catherine Brady

  Nona Caspers

  Scott Landers

  Ann Marlowe

  Ira Wood

  Caron Knauer, steadfast and canny ally

  Oklahoma State University for generously providing time and opportunity

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications, in which the stories originally appeared:

  “Belvedere,” Hotel Amerika; “Burglar,” Passages North; “Ash,”

  Southern Humanities Review; “The Suicide Club,” Jabberwock Review;

  “Drop Zone,” Arroyo Literary Review; “Hope Springs,” Epiphany;

  “God’s Playground,” Confrontation; “FUBAR,” The Meadow

  THE SUICIDE CLUB

  GOD’S PLAYGROUND

  The end and beginnings of beings are unknown.

  We see only the intervening formations.

  Then what cause is there for grief?

  SHRI KRISHNA

  When Jane McAllister wakes at 3:00 a.m., she hears a faint groaning from the closet. She knows it’s the coat hangers.

  The whispery moaning from the closet is neither a delusion brought on by her loneliness in Hope Springs, Oklahoma, nor a frightening spectre from the twilight zone. Rather, there is a scientific basis for the sound. Jane can now hear the murmurs of wire hangers; she has become receptive to sounds she might once have blocked out, just as canines can hear a dog whistle while their human masters cannot.

  She has read that when the weight of clothing on wire hangers makes them sag, the hangers emit ultra-low-frequency sounds, deep moans and groans. Some sci-fi writer might spin a yarn about a woman who goes mad listening to coat hangers, but Jane does not feel as if she’s losing her sanity. No: she feels a bit like she did when she ate peyote buttons once with her chums in college and could see and hear everything for a few hours—could see the molecules whirling in the surfaces of tables, could see the rich blue paint that decades before had covered the walls but was now hidden beneath several coats of white.

  A twinge tugs at her abdomen, and when Jane slides a hand under her nightgown, she thinks she feels a knot there, just above and to the left of her navel. Cancer? Probably not, she decides—cancer is not a disease of her family. More likely she could have a benign ovarian cyst or a simple polyp on her colon. But what if the lump is a fetus in fetu, like the horrid thing she saw the other night on the Discovery Channel?

  One can live her whole life without knowing that inside her body are the remains of her own monstrous twin. The TV program explained that sometimes when a woman is pregnant with twins, early in the gestation period one fetus fails to develop, but rather than being expelled from the mother’s body, the stunted fetus is absorbed into the body of its twin, sometimes ending up in the abdominal cavity of the other baby. The absorbed twin has no brain but lives on as a mindless parasite, sucking life from its twin like a grotesque human tapeworm. The program depicted an eight-year-old boy who had a suspicious growth removed from his abdomen. The growth contained vestigial body parts: teeth, long black hair, flipperish partial hands and feet. The brainless growth with its long hair looked like a cross between a pile of gruesome detritus and a cannibal tribe’s shrunken head.

  Jane lies there for a long time in the dark, her hand passing again and again over the thickness in her abdomen. Does she feel it move? She can almost see her twin, her mindless doppelgänger, its blind eyes staring in the dark.

  After breakfast, Jane goes out into the garden to water the rear lawn. The woman who lives in the house behind hers pops out her own kitchen door and calls hello. Jane nods to her. Though she wishes to be neighborly, she knows she has never been particularly adept at making small talk. She figures the neighbors are probably curious about the California transplant who lives alone, reputedly a psychologist of some kind and the only registered Democrat on her block. She imagines they might make fun of her behind her back, suspecting “overly educated” people of snootiness.

  Once she has placed the sprinkler in the center of the lawn, she heads back to the house, but just before her hand touches the doorknob, Jane hears a raspy greeting from the old lady who lives next door.

  “Pretty day, isn’t it?”

  Jane acknowledges that indeed the day is pleasant and adds, “How are you?”

  “Oh, I’m fine,” the neighbor says, “but we had a terrible scare with Earl.”

  Earl is the woman’s husband, a stoic-faced man who comes and goes in a pickup truck, a ball cap shading his weathered face.

  “A scare?” Jane turns to the woman, sees loneliness and fear in her expression.

  “He had a heart attack,” she says. “It’s a merkle he’s alive.”

  Jane knows the woman actually said “miracle.” She learned this after awkwardly asking, “Excuse me?” the first few times she heard Oklahomans pronounce the word as “merkle.”

  “I’m sorry, I had no idea,” Jane says, which is true. She has not heard an ambulance in the neighborhood recently; maybe the poor soul was stricken at the wheel of his truck. She does not ask for details, aware that she has to see clients at the clinic in half an hour.

  “It’s a merkle” is a phrase Jane now hears daily, a refrain that resounds in Oklahoma like an ever-present echo. In Oklahoma a miracle seems to happen every twenty minutes. If a doctor performs a medical procedure that saves a patient’s life, the result is considered not the logical outcome of the treatment but rather a merkle. If a tornado highballs through the county but misses one’s own house, that close call is attributed not to chance but to a merkle. One sees knots of praying people on the television news every evening, praying for a merkle for this or that terminal patient or lost cause. When the merkle fails to materialize, the faithful in Jane’s new home state purse their lips and proclaim, “Everything happens for a reason.” Jane opens the back door to her house, pauses, and says, “Is
your husband all right now?”

  “We think so,” the neighbor says. “At times like this, I pray. I pray and pray.”

  “I hope that works for you,” Jane says. She observes an instantaneous look of shock on the woman’s face. Jane realizes too late that, as far as this elderly Oklahoma Baptist is concerned, she might as well have said Eat Shit and Die. She suddenly regrets the sticker she ordered from a catalogue and just this week attached to the bumper of her car: STOP PRAYING AND DO SOMETHING. Jane hears the woman’s screen door slam.

  Jane cannot help herself, she says a little prayer: Please, please, please, not another entire day of nothing but eating disorders. Already late for the clinic, when she approaches her car in the driveway she sees immediately that both rear tires are flat. She bends to examine one. Quite clearly the tire has been slashed. She wonders who would slash her tires and whether it was simply random vandalism. But then she sees that the rear window of her car has been soaped, and scrawled in soap letters is a crude 666. She has apparently been designated the neighborhood Antichrist. The stop-praying-and-do-something sticker has been revised by a black marker to read START PRAYING AND DO SOMETHING. If the sticker was intended to send a message to the community, the sticker revision and the sixes have sent her a return message: We don’t want your kind here. Rather than praying for a miracle, she calls triple-A.

  Jane sits in the waiting area of the service station while her car’s rear tires are replaced, thinking that one thing she truly appreciates about Oklahoma is that—unlike San Francisco—it still has full-serve stations. Not only do uniformed attendants rush out to pump the gas and wash the car’s windows, but they actually offer to vacuum out the car, gratis. Each time she drives into a gas station here, she has the pleasant feeling of being in a time warp. She remembers sitting in the backseat of her family’s old Buick, smelling the intoxicating fumes of Shell, listening to her father chat with a white-capped attendant while hearing in the background the bonking sounds of heavy glass Coca-Cola bottles being released from coolers in the station.

  After her car is outfitted with two new tires, Jane pulls the vehicle into the full-service aisle to get some gas. The attendant who pumps her gas gives her a strange look as he gestures at the 666 on her back window and calls out, “Can I wash that off for you?”

  “Please,” she replies, forcing a smile and offering no explanation. As he scrubs off the numerals, he spies the ♥ “I San Francisco” frame around the license plate and approaches the driver’s side window, asking, “Are you from California?”

  “Born and bred,” Jane says, then feels herself flush at the word “bred,” which seems a bit graphic.

  “Were you ever attacked by birds?”

  For a moment, Jane does not know how to reply to this astonishing inquiry. Finally she simply answers, truthfully: “I was viciously pecked in the head once by a huge black bird—a starling or a crow. I guess I was too near its nest.”

  He nods, and Jane suddenly gets it. The guy must have seen Hitchcock’s The Birds on Turner Classics. He has no concept of what California is like, other than from movies and TV. To him, Jane’s home state is an alien land where savage avian attacks can happen anytime.

  When Jane arrives home from the clinic, exhausted by six hours of bulimics, she catches a glimpse of herself in the hallway mirror and is startled. Her face is simultaneously familiar and strange, and she pauses to look more closely. Maybe it’s just the hair, she figures—her hair is today giving her a strange appearance. In an attempt at frizz control, she became carried away with the flat iron, and now her hair is overly straight and sticks out at the bottom in an artificial manner. Her hair is balky even at its best, but in its fried-straight mode today, it looks like the hair one sometimes sees on African American women: coarse, artificially broom-straw straight, the ends sticking out from overuse of hot combs.

  She sees that she looks a bit wild-eyed. Has she taken too much decongestant, or did she accidentally double up on her hormone tablets?

  Only two days ago she saw a program about wild-eyed zombies in Haiti. The camera followed two live humans, lurching across the television screen, who were described by the narrator as zombies—not as “so-called zombies” or “zombie-like,” but flat-out zombies. Her hand stilled on the remote control when she heard that one. Zombies, weren’t they mythical creatures or figments? Why was the word “zombie” coming from the mouth of a network journalist? It seemed there were people in Haiti who died, were buried, but later came up out of their graves and walked among their neighbors, with vacant, dark-pupiled stares in their eyes, living but not quite with us. Do zombies breathe? Are they spirits, per se? Jane knows that the Latin word for “breath” is spiritus, so to be a spirit is in fact to breathe.

  The program informed viewers that there was some basis in reality for the zombie phenomenon. Local witch doctors created the zombies to serve their own needs. First the medicine man chose a victim to poison—usually a local miscreant of some sort, a thief or an adulteress. After the wrongdoer was publicly excoriated for the crime, the shaman secretly administered a potion, one that immediately propelled the victim into a coma so deep it mimicked death. Tetrodotoxin extracted from the puffer fish was so virulent that, with a very low dose, the poisoned person was instantly paralyzed. This much Jane can easily believe, as she herself has twice been poisoned by something as benign as swordfish consumed in a tony restaurant. Each time, she ate a fresh and tasty seafood meal, but within hours she fell suddenly asleep, actually slumping over, laying her head down and falling into a deep slumber, like the guests at the party in Sleeping Beauty.

  Shortly after his victims were buried, the Haitian witch doctor would return in the dark to the graves and exhume them. More often than not, the victims were still alive, remaining comatose. A couple of days later they would wake, stand, and walk, often with a vacant look in their eyes. As with other forms of suspended animation—be it from freezing in an ice pond or from cardiac arrest—loss of oxygen to the brain often resulted in damage to that organ. Some of the dug-up sinners returned to their communities, chastened and nicely frightened into compliance, but others were little more than dead bipeds on the move.

  Toward the end of the month, Jane usually finds herself in the local Walmart. When she runs out of money, she economizes by shopping here, though she dislikes buying from this megachain. She takes out her checkbook to pay for a box of Sudafed, after first signing a form as if she were some sort of registered sex offender. Oklahoma, per the recent national trend, has outlawed over-the-counter sale of pseudoephedrine, one of the meth-cooking ingredients. One now has to face down the pharmacist and go on record before being allowed to relieve her own nasal congestion. After she writes a check, the amount appears on a lighted display above the cash register, along with the flashing words Waiting on approval. She cannot help herself, she points to the lighted letters and says to the pharmacy associate, “That sign is incorrect. It should say waiting for, not waiting on.” The clerk simply stares at Jane, his facial expression flickering between disinterest and malice.

  Now the store’s PA system blares forth: “Surprise Dad with new power tools for Father’s Day! Our biggest sale of the year is taking place right now!” Oh, sweet Jesus, next Sunday is Father’s Day. If Valentine’s Day was once the most painful day of the year, this has now changed for the worse. All one needs for a really, really swell Father’s Day is for one’s own father to have committed suicide. Not only is she reminded again, as she is in some manner every day, that she no longer has a father, but there are of course the unspoken words from her father’s grave: I’d rather be dead than stay alive for a daughter like you.

  As she leaves the pharmaceuticals department, Jane passes the greeting card section, where clumps of shoppers, primarily women, huddle around the Father’s Day cards, reaching over each other’s heads to select exactly the right message for dear old Dad.

  Jane is bushwhacked by a devastating memory of something long forgotten. She
sees herself as she was then, in her twenties, not yet married, browsing through racks of Father’s Day cards. An attractive man was standing next to her, also looking at cards, and Jane said, “Gee, it’s hard to find the right Father’s Day card when you can’t stand your father.” The man laughed appreciatively and gave her an appraising glance, and Jane blushed, proud of her irreverence. Even then, she was well on her way to becoming a Goneril or Regan, one of Lear’s bad daughters. And had not her father indeed gone blind like Lear, and had he not gone mad? Would it have killed her to be more like Cordelia, a better daughter—could she not have troubled herself to buy a loving Father’s Day card for the man who sired and supported her? But no, she was too busy being a rebellious little shit, too busy making what she thought were witty remarks as she flirted.

  “Show Dad how much you care!” the PA system now exhorts.

  She notices that she is shuffling from the bedroom to the kitchen. Yes, I shuffle, she acknowledges, listening to the swish-swish of the soles of her slippers as she slides like a geriatric case along the hardwood floors on the way to the stove for another cup of coffee. Christ, she does not even have the spirit to pick up her feet.

  At the table, she flips to the obits as is her daily habit. She often jokes that her Irish blood drives her to do so: her mother always wryly referred to the obituaries as “the Irish sports page.” In any case, Jane can count on the newspaper to get her up to speed on who is still left on this earth and who has been recently added to the mounting pile of corpses that signifies her passage through middle age. When she was young, she never understood why her parents and grandparents indulged in major lamentations every time some superannuated matinee idol or has-been crooner dropped dead, but now she understands all too well.

  The obits in Oklahoma publications are particularly strange, Jane finds. Seldom is the cause of death reported—which, other than the age of the deceased, is the most relevant information. No, rather than the cause of death, what is reported here is the church affiliation of the deceased. But of course, no one actually dies in Oklahoma. Jane has yet to see the word “died” in an obit in this state of the Union. Rather, what is reported is that Jim-Bob or Kyle or Misty “went to join the angels” or “was reunited with her Lord Jesus” or “sits on the lap of the Blessed Savior.” In today’s local newspaper, beneath the photo of a closed-eyed infant appearing post mortem, are the words “entered God’s playground.”