Suicide Club

by Rachel Heng

  She was afraid he would say more, but he stopped, looking back down at his drink.

  “Aren’t you—are they still looking for you?” Lea said in a low voice. She was grateful for the roar of conversation, the shouted orders and the incessant grinding buzz of the industrial juicers.

  “It’s good to see you,” her father said, ignoring her question. “I mean, I wish it could have been under better circumstances. Without you running into rush-hour traffic in the middle of Broadway and all. But still, so good to see you. I can see you’re doing well. Really well.”

  “I am,” Lea said. For a moment she allowed herself to believe that she was seeing her father after a long trip away. That he had gone somewhere for work for a few weeks, for a month. That they had a close, lifelong relationship, full of daily phone calls, shared Nutripak meals, long walks in the park. “I’m up for a promotion at work,” she said, even though he didn’t even know what she did, didn’t know anything about the past eighty-eight years of her life.

  Kaito grinned. “Of course you are. Bet no one else stands a chance. Bet you’re walloping them all.”

  Lea blinked. Did he think this was funny, just one big joke?

  “Why are you here?” Her voice was stronger now, and she no longer felt like she was about to cry or shout.

  She saw the movement of the streets reflected in the bright pinpricks of his eyes, and it struck her, forcefully, that her father was in there. In this shrunken body, this shell of his former self, it was still him. The same man who’d brought her a plastic dinosaur toy every time he went away on a business trip, the same man who’d carried Samuel thirty blocks to the hospital when the ambulance was stalled in traffic. The same man who’d cried when her brother closed his eyes for the last time. The first man Lea had ever seen cry.

  Finally he spoke.

  “I’m getting old, Lea.” He smiled another ironic smile.

  It hit her then that he was only a decade younger than her mother. Which made him a hundred and seventy, an impressive age for someone of his generation. They’d always known, of course, that he would outlive Uju. His number had always been higher than hers, an ancestral advantage he’d brought with him from the small mountain town in central Honshu to America, all those years ago.

  “And, well, I’ve missed you,” he said.

  Her insides squeezed. I’ve missed you too, she thought. But what now? What did he think they could be now? There was no family left. Their family had fallen apart a long time ago. She had a different life now, a different purpose.

  “I—I need to go,” Lea said. Under the counter, she scraped one thumbnail across ragged cuticles, drawing blood faster than the skin could grow back.

  Kaito sighed, and she saw it move through him, rising up from his chest, rippling through his face. In the lines that radiated out from the edges of his eyes and circled his mouth, Lea saw every expression he had ever made. It occurred to her that almost all those smiles and frowns and sighs had taken place outside the boundaries of her life, in some other realm to which he had banished himself voluntarily. The thought made it easier for her to give him the impersonal nod that she gave him now.

  The check arrived and Lea pulled out her wallet. Her father didn’t try to pay, only watched as she handed the waiter a card. When the waiter was gone, Lea busied herself with her coat and purse.

  “Look,” her father said in a low voice. “I thought of calling you many times, of sending you a message, paying you a visit. Believe me, I wanted to. But it would have only made things worse. I knew Uju had done a great job of dealing with—everything. You were happy, healthy. Healthfin job. Todd. You had, have, a great life. And I get it, I really do. What else were you supposed to do? Sit around and pine after your deadbeat, antisanct, absent dad?”

  Lea slipped off the bar stool. “I need to go,” she muttered again.

  “Especially after what happened at school, you know—” He stopped, running his hands over his cheeks.

  Lea became aware of the unnaturally bright voices of the group next to them, the sideways glances between what seemed like choreographed laughter.

  “I really, really have to go. Goodbye, Dad,” she said.

  But something inside her cracked when she said the word Dad, and she saw from the way he blinked that he had felt it, too.

  “Wait.” He pulled a pen out from the inside of his blazer and scribbled something down onto a damp napkin. When he was done, he thrust it at her. “Just in case you want to—I don’t know, talk. Or something.” He leaned toward her and slipped the napkin into her purse.

  She didn’t look back as she maneuvered her way through the crowd. It was only after she stepped out of the juice bar and was standing on the pavement that she allowed herself to look. Her father had made no move to leave. He sat with his head bowed, staring at the half-drunk smoothie clasped between his hands.

  The young men next to him were handing around one of the babies, whose balled fleshy fists flailed about as it was passed. The adults’ faces were lit up with joy, all their attention focused laserlike on the child, their eyes and hands alert to its every twitch. The baby began to cry, noiselessly, behind the glass window. Its face was a purple knot of flesh, glistening and ugly with need.

  SEVEN

  When her father disappeared eighty-eight years ago, he had been a large man. Nothing like the gangly, shrunken shape he was now—back then, he’d been broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, his arms hefty lampposts, his legs solid trunks. Lea remembered hanging onto his neck as a child; the entire length of her arms encircling the width of it and her hands just meeting on the other side. She’d been small, of course, much smaller, when he’d left. Twelve years old, yet she remembered those months as if they’d happened yesterday.

  Lea remembered Kaito as a large man, but the pictures of him at thirty, forty, fifty even, showed him to be as svelte and toned as any top-decile lifer today. In one picture he was suave in tennis whites, his long black hair pulled back from his face by a pink terrycloth headband, racket head balanced on the cracked red clay. In others he stood with Uju next to a waterfall in Peru, both carrying backpacks taller than themselves, wearing embarrassing sunhats and grinning widely. In Lea’s favorite picture, her father was on a sailboat, his tanned face silhouetted against the brilliant blue sky. He leaned against the boat’s prow, a tiny baby cradled in his arms. Samuel.

  She wished she’d known him, this man who played recreational sports, who wore crisp workout clothes in pastel colors, whose arm was slung over his wife’s shoulder with such easy affection. She could not detect the vein of cynicism that she had always associated with him. The man in the pictures was as straightforwardly life-loving as he was physically fit.

  Everything started going wrong after the Second Wave. So went the family folklore, passed down to Lea by Uju. They’d had the lifespan tests and predictive treatments for decades, even when Samuel was born, but this was something different. The Second Wave, it was dubbed, when a whole raft of new Medtech measures were approved for mass distribution: first-generation SmartBloodTM, an early prototype of what would later become DiamondSkinTM, the first truly functional replacements. And with the new technologies, a whole host of new Directives, aimed at keeping the Ministry’s biggest investments—lifers—safe and healthy. The Second Wave. There would be immortals by the Third.

  “Maybe your children,” Uju used to say to Lea, the excitement in her voice sheathed in a note of envy. “Maybe even you.”

  “Sounds terrible,” Kaito would reply, shaking his head. “Who wants to live forever? Especially now they want us to give up steak.”

  It was some time after the Second Wave began that Kaito’s middle began to swell, his wrists and ankles thickening with rolls of flesh, as if in direct opposition to the new monthly maintenance requirement and the nutritional scales that were appearing in grocery stores. He would go out of his way to seek out the burger joints and fried-chicken diners that were slowly closing down, one after another.
He stopped playing tennis, and the hiking trips he used to take with Uju became a thing of the past.

  Uju, newly promoted and reaping the benefits of being a senior official in a Ministry-affiliated organization, was put onto Talent Global’s company-wide maintenance plan for executives. And as she grew leaner, stronger, taller, Kaito became the opposite. His middle softened, his jowls grew prosperous. He bought new shirts to fit his new body, threw himself into his pharmaceutical sales job, taking on brutal cross-country trips that involved multiple stops and red-eyes, weeks away from the family.

  This was the Kaito that Lea remembered. She’d never met the vital man in the pictures, the man who could have been featured in the Forty Minutes a Day campaign. The father she had known as a child made rude jokes, got into fights with Uju about Nutripak meals, clamored for burgers and steaks—trad food, as it was now called.

  Kaito had always been what her mother would call difficult, but before Samuel died, it had never caused any real problems between them. Lea remembered the way her mother would playfully smack his hand away from the fried chicken he brought home, the way he’d laugh and pull her down onto the couch, pretend to force-feed her chunks of crispy batter. She remembered following her mother to her office on Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, remembered the excited, gleeful questions from Uju’s colleagues about Kaito. And what’s he up to now? And then he said what? Oh, he didn’t! She remembered being proud when they exclaimed she looked just like him. She told them more stories about her unusual, independent, rebellious father. Though she’d never admit it, Uju too was proud.

  As Lea grew up, she remembered it used to be different. And she remembered when it all changed.

  * * *

  The summer after Samuel died, Uju had the windows in their three-bedroom apartment sealed shut, citing Directive 7077A: The High-Rise Protection Act. They lived on a low floor of an old building in Borough Five, so technically, they weren’t required to seal their windows. Not yet, at least, not until twenty years later, when Directive 7077C would be drafted to include apartments located on the second to fifth floors. Still, Uju wanted to be proactive. Anticipating developments in the pipeline was how she put it, as if their family were a newly formed corporation responding to impending regulatory change, rather than the broken, grieving remains of what had once been a unit of four.

  Time was unbalanced that summer. One moment it was a slipstream, a whirling eddy of tears and tantrums; the next it was perfectly still, a crystalline gel in which the three remaining family members were suspended. While heat waves festered in the streets outside, their apartment stayed cold and stale, deliberately chilled, as if preserving something that would soon be gone. There would come a time when Samuel’s ghost did not lurk near every set table and every empty armchair. Now was not that time. Now they sealed themselves in, protected from the heat that rose from the pavements and hovered, trapped, between buildings.

  The air-conditioning was ostensibly what set it off. It was Saturday, Lea remembered, and she and Kaito had been home all day. Uju was at the office again, for the third weekend in a row. Lea sat cross-legged on the floor, math homework spread out over the coffee table. She wasn’t making much progress, in part because she’d missed two months of school to be at the hospital with Samuel, in part because of Kaito’s fidgeting. He lay sprawled on the three-seater couch behind her, his bulk spreading over the patterned upholstery. He held a book suspended over his face, but Lea was all too aware that he hadn’t turned a page in over an hour. Instead, he sighed and shifted, scratched his head loudly, crossed and uncrossed his legs.

  “Can you hear it?” he asked, all of a sudden. “You can hear it, right?”

  “What?” Lea answered in an irritable tone. I can hear you, she said to herself.

  “That buzzing. It’s deafening.”

  Lea cocked her head and then shook it.

  “I don’t hear anything,” she said.

  “How can you not hear it?” Kaito hauled himself upright, sending a cascade of cushions over the couch edge, huffing as he sat up.

  Even his breathing was loud, Lea found herself thinking uncharitably.

  “I’m trying to work, Dad,” she said, as kindly as she could.

  “But you can’t work with that noise, of course, yes, understandably. Don’t worry, we’ll figure out what it is.” He stood up and walked over to the window.

  Lea turned back to her homework. The derivative of x2 is 2x. The derivative of x is 1.

  Kaito clapped his hands loudly. “The air-conditioning. Of course.” He was staring at the vents above the window, arms akimbo.

  “I really don’t hear anything,” Lea muttered.

  “Come here, Lea. You’ll hear it from here.”

  Lea lowered the screen of her laptop. “I’m busy, Dad, I really have to finish this.”

  A strange look flashed across Kaito’s face. It was a look that Lea had seen more than once in recent months, a tightening of the jaw, a hardening of the eyes. She didn’t like it. It made her feel empty, unsettled, alone. Derivative: the slope of a curve, the rate of change.

  So she shut her laptop and walked over to where Kaito was standing. She craned her neck, looking up at the innocuous gray grate in the ceiling, tried her best to see what Kaito was seeing, to hear what he was hearing. She cocked her head, strained her ears, but still she heard nothing more. All she heard was the muffled noise of cars passing outside, the rise and fall of Kaito’s breathing, the faint footsteps of their upstairs neighbor.

  But when she turned to Kaito, he looked so eager, so expectant, that she found herself nodding her head.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s the air-conditioning.”

  “I told you!” he burst out triumphantly. “Now, pass me a chair. I’m going to turn it off.”

  “What?” she said. “You can’t turn it off. It’s so hot outside.”

  But Kaito was already dragging a dining chair over to the window, reaching up to the air-conditioning unit.

  “They make it so hard,” he muttered. “Can’t even turn something off when you want to anymore. Clima-smart. Intelligent cooling. State of the art. State of the art, my ass.” He ran his hands around the gray metal box, searching for the manual override button.

  “Hah!” he said at last, flicking a switch that Lea couldn’t see. Sure enough, the air-conditioning slowed to a stop. The air in the apartment stood still.

  “We’ll die of heat in here,” Lea exclaimed.

  “Don’t be silly. We’re not dying of anything,” Kaito said.

  He paused. The strange expression returned. He climbed down from the chair slowly. She watched as he carefully placed the chair back in its corner, his movements slow and deliberate, his face distant and empty.

  Lea sighed and sat back down at the coffee table, opening her laptop once again.

  With the sun blazing through the windows, it only took ten minutes before a thin film of sweat began forming on her forehead. Her armpits were hot and damp, the backs of her knees slick, the sleeves of her light cotton blouse stuck to her arms. Kaito had returned to his position on the couch, engrossed in his book once again. He had stopped fidgeting and didn’t seem to notice the heat. Lea didn’t say anything, only stretched her legs out under the coffee table to prevent her calves from touching her thighs, forced herself to ignore the suffocating heat. But when she heard the key in the door, her heart sank. Uju. Lea looked around the apartment in a panic, wondering foolishly if she could turn the air-conditioning back on in time.

  “Hello,” Uju called as the door swung open, her voice clipped and bright, full of the outside world, full of the things at work that kept her so busy, so apart from the unnamed absence in their home.

  “Oh, my God,” she gasped as she entered the apartment. “Did the air-conditioning break? Have you called someone? Why haven’t they fixed it yet? Kaito, what are you doing? I’ll phone the building manager right now.”

  “Hey,” Kaito said from the couch. “Oh. Yes, I guess
we could call someone. It was making this awful noise, a loud buzzing noise. It was driving me batshit crazy.”

  “Weird. And then it stopped working, just like that?”

  Lea held her breath, stared intently at her laptop screen, hands frozen on the keyboard. Suddenly she missed Samuel desperately. The feeling hit her in the chest, a blow that left her winded and empty. Samuel would have known what to do. Samuel would have made a joke, asked Uju about her day, distracted her from the airless apartment. Samuel would never have let Kaito turn the air-conditioning off in the first place.

  “No,” Kaito said cheerfully. “I turned it off.”

  Lea glanced at Uju out of the corner of her eye, without moving her head. Uju was standing in the entryway, her left shoulder weighed down by her laptop bag. She wore a light gray pantsuit, a crisp white shirt under her blazer. The keys in her right hand glinted in the sunlight, like a bunch of tiny knives.

  “You turned it off,” she repeated, in a low voice. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

  Kaito waved a hand in her direction. “What’s there to understand? It was making a noise. I turned it off. Hey, if you hadn’t had the windows sealed, we’d be able to open them and get some fresh air like normal people, instead of having to have the damn air-conditioning on all the time.”

  Uju dropped her bag to the floor with a loud thump. “I don’t believe this,” she said. “I can’t—are you trying to drive me insane?”

  “We can just turn it on again, Mom,” Lea said.

  “No, Lea,” Uju said. “Your father wants us to live like normal people, he says. He wishes I’d never had the windows sealed, he says.”

  As Lea looked at the signs and equations on her screen, it occurred to her that three was an unstable number. Four was even, four was balanced, four was safe. Now that they were three, they would always be in flux, always pulling in different directions, Lea caught between the two, until—until what?