Suicide Club

by Rachel Heng

  “Saturday’s no good,” he said. “How about Sunday?”

  “Why?” she pressed, trying to keep her tone light. “What are you doing on Saturday?”

  “Oh, nothing,” he said vaguely. He picked her empty glass up from the dining table and began to rinse it. “Just some errands. Sunday works better for me.”

  Lea was silent as she absorbed his answer.

  “Aren’t you going to eat that?” her father said.

  She was still holding the ice cream cone. Her fingers had grown numb with cold. “Yes.” Lea nodded, tearing at the paper.

  It was only when the cold sweet fluid touched her lips that she remembered she was eating sugar, synthetic sugar, non-fruit sugar. And dairy, preservatives, additives, food coloring. She thought of the days she would lose from eating that ice cream, the spike in insulin levels that so much sugar would trigger. She thought of the cravings that would come later, the potential addiction that would set in.

  It was too late, for she had already gulped half of it down. It was delicious. She stared at the ice cream, melting in her hands, dripping between her fingers, and took another greedy bite. The cloying sweetness was almost too much to bear, almost sour in its intensity, like a forgotten secret.

  * * *

  Lea got home late that night, on purpose, so that she wouldn’t have to explain herself to Todd yet again. He normally went to sleep early, sometimes before sunset, so as to ensure optimal circadian rhythm compliance. She was still thinking about her father—his shoebox apartment, his spartan life—when she stepped into the living room, so she didn’t immediately find it strange to see Todd sitting on the sofa in the dark.

  “Hey,” she said. “What are you doing up?”

  “Where have you been?” he said.

  “Office,” Lea answered. The lie slipped out of her casually. She shrugged her coat off and stretched. “I’m exhausted. Why aren’t you asleep?”

  “Office,” Todd said. “Which account are you working on? I thought the Musk account got pulled.”

  She turned to him. Todd was doing something with his feet she’d never seen before. He was tapping his heel, jerking his knee up and down, in an erratic, nervous motion. He wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at his tablet.

  “What are you doing?” Lea said.

  “What?” Todd lowered his hand and met her eyes.

  “Your tab. You’re looking at it.”

  “Oh, yes. Just emails, you know how it is.”

  Lea narrowed her eyes. “No, Todd, I don’t know how it is. Why don’t you tell me?” she said calmly.

  “You said you were in the office?” he said again.

  “What’s this about, Todd?”

  She could tell him the truth, Lea thought. She could tell her partner of twenty years the reason why she had been slipping out of work early, why she disappeared for long hours on weekends.

  Todd was looking at his tab again. “I tried calling your office line, you never picked up.”

  No, she couldn’t tell Todd.

  “I called several times through the day. Finally, Natalie picked up.”

  Her hands turned cold.

  “She said you weren’t there. She said she hadn’t seen you all day.”

  Todd was typing. He was typing something into his tablet as he spoke to her.

  “What are you doing, Todd?”

  “I should be the one asking you that, Lea. What are you doing? Where have you been?”

  Before she could stop herself, Lea had walked over to him and grabbed his tablet out of his hands.

  He didn’t protest, only folded his arms and pursed his lips.

  On-screen was an app that Lea had never seen before. Its interface was gloomy, though the font was clean and modern. Todd had “checked in,” and a small red dot showed their position on a map. Under “mood,” a green circle blinked. It was recording. At the corner of the screen was a stylized heart.

  “What is this?” Lea demanded.

  “I had a long conversation with Natalie. We’re worried, Lea.”

  Her insides churned. “Oh. Natalie’s concerned. Of course she is. How convenient for her to be concerned.”

  Todd frowned. “Jesus, Lea. It’s got nothing to do with your—competition at work. Why do you always assume—”

  “Why do I always assume the worst?” Lea stuck Todd’s tablet in his face. “Clearly I wasn’t assuming anything close to the worst, or it wouldn’t come as such a surprise to me that my fiancé would be trying to get me stuck on the Observation List forever.”

  “Don’t be like that, Lea.”

  “I’m sorry, clearly the fault is mine here.”

  “Anyway, talking to Natalie—it cleared my head. I realized I had to do something, that I wasn’t helping you by staying silent about all your disappearances, your moodiness, your strange behavior. I mean look at you—creeping about late at night, lying about where you’ve been—where have you been? I don’t know what’s going on, Lea.”

  “So, what? You’re reporting on me to the Ministry? Please explain to me how this is helping, Todd. Because I really don’t see how this is making anything better.”

  “I just don’t know what else to do. I don’t want things to get worse. Especially with the rumors about the Third Wave coming—I want what’s best for you, what’s best for us.”

  What’s best for us. Something clicked.

  “You’re afraid,” Lea said flatly. “You’re afraid that me being on the List will affect your chances if the Third Wave happens. You’re not worried about me at all, you only care about your goddamn self.”

  His silence told her everything she needed to know.

  * * *

  Lea gave Todd a week to move out. He didn’t argue; it wasn’t in his nature. That week, he tiptoed around the apartment as if it were made of porcelain, his footsteps soft and attentive. He started talking to her in a considerate, hushed voice, his eyebrows permanently raised in solicitude. He began leaving the toilet seat down.

  * * *

  She couldn’t pinpoint exactly when it first appeared, but it was that week that she spotted it. Her first wrinkle, a clean fold extending out from the inner corner of her right eye. Looking closely, she saw that while the most obvious, it was not the only one. A delicate web radiated outward from the tear ducts, minuscule rays of lined flesh, barely perceptible but nevertheless there. Along with the wrinkles came a tightness in her abdomen. It felt like a ball of rubber bands, stretched over one another, each more taut than the last. Everything Todd did—the way he placed a fork on the kitchen table, the splayed ivory bristles of his designer toothbrush in the bathroom, an ironed shirt hanging on a window frame—all of it she kept inside, wound more and more tightly around that ball of slow rage.

  On the third day of silence, as Todd crept past her with a glass of water, Lea reached out and grabbed his wrist. He stopped at her touch.

  “How long have you been doing it?” she asked.

  Todd’s eyes were bloodshot, unhappy, but still had that new, unfamiliar edge to them.

  “Not long,” he said quickly, as if he had been waiting for her to ask. “The Observers came to me right after it happened. Said I would be helping speed things along, since you had nothing to hide. They said it was better not to tell you. Then you could prove you were fine, and you could come off the List.”

  His words made sense to her, but something in his voice was different. Beneath the pleading tone was a certain care, a planned thoughtfulness. His words seemed carefully chosen, too carefully chosen.

  “So what have you told them?” Lea said, her tone even.

  “Nothing, really. I don’t see why—” He ran one hand through his hair, boyishly, pleading innocence. “Trivial things, like what you ate, how long you were in the bathroom, the number of times you scratched that mole on your neck this morning. I don’t know why they even want to know any of it at all.”

  “What else?” Lea said. Did you tell them about my father? But of co
urse he hadn’t. He didn’t know about Kaito.

  “Nothing!” Todd said. “Well, when you get home. When you come home late at night. When—” He paused.

  “Go on,” Lea said tersely.

  He cast his eyes to the ground.

  “Go on, Todd,” she said again.

  “You might not like it,” he said slowly, as if she were hard of hearing. “But I think, to some extent, maybe, there’s no harm in getting, you know, help.”

  As he spoke, Todd’s face changed. It had a serene, evangelical quality to it, all lifted chin and wide eyes and flushed cheeks.

  It was only then that Lea noticed how clear his skin was. Fairer than usual, almost translucent. His freckles glowed a faded pink.

  “What have you done to your face?” Lea said.

  Todd winced and glanced down. Lea’s fingers were wrapped, viselike, around his wrist. Her fingernails left half moons in his soft skin when she let go.

  “They’re experts, you know.” Todd went on as if he hadn’t heard. “I mean, what do we know about being at risk? What experience do we have with safeguarding? And it’s, I guess, my responsibility. It’s all our responsibility, I mean, if you did hurt yourself, I would be responsible. I mean—”

  “Todd, listen to yourself. This is insane.”

  He stared back blankly. Then, worse still, a look of soft concern came over his face.

  “Lea, what I’m saying is maybe you should give it a shot. Stop sneaking around, come clean. Take them seriously. Take this whole thing seriously.”

  Her cheeks burned. He was telling her to take it seriously? What else had she been doing, schlepping down to WeCovery, tolerating the Observers, even working with Natalie on her accounts, and here was Todd, Todd with his perfect skin and Healthfin trust fund and spying ways, here he was telling her to take it all seriously. As if that were the problem.

  “I think you should leave now. Take a bag. I’ll send you the rest of your stuff by courier.”

  Todd’s lip twitched. “I can’t leave. Even if I wanted to, I can’t. You can’t be unaccompanied. It’s for your own safety, you know.”

  There was that strange gleam again. The tip of Todd’s alpine nose was shiny and pink, his cheeks impossibly rosy. She wondered about the tiny blood vessels beneath his skin, wondered how easily they would break should she strike him. Again, there it was, the old feeling humming underneath the surface.

  Bringing the glass of water to his lips, Todd took one long sip, eyes never leaving hers.

  There was a split second in which something flashed before her, a split second filled with possibilities, but then that moment was over and Lea was raising her hand, slapping the glass away from his lips.

  The noise of shattering against the floorboards was louder than she’d expected. It was a rude, disorderly sound, a sound she had only heard once before, as a child in a restaurant. Then, the noise had cut through the mundane hum of conversation, inciting craned necks and quiet murmurs, the harsh words from an invisible chef to the unfortunate culprit. It wasn’t often, these days, that things broke anymore. Everything was toughened, reinforced, enhanced. You really had to try to break something.

  Pieces of glass were puddled in the spilled water. It had not shattered, rather, broken into large pieces, four or five of them in total, jagged and twinkling at the edges. Strewn across the floor, they looked like an incomplete jigsaw puzzle, an art installation. Lea knelt and picked up the largest piece. It had been the base of the glass, a heavy crown that shone like ice. As she turned it in her hand, the light caught its clean, jagged edges, winking and sparkling. A ghostly fragment of her face, her mother’s nose and her father’s eyes, gazed up from the glass.

  She flung the shard hard against the wall. There was that noise again, but this time she was expecting it. The sound of shattering seemed to cut through her skin in some way, seemed to slit the thin protective coating that surrounded everything up till then. Blood rushed to her cheeks. The feeling that swelled up within her, something alive and vital, was something she had not felt since she was a child, before she learned to stop breaking things.

  * * *

  Todd had not moved. The hand that had been holding the glass remained outstretched, fingers wrapped dumbly around air. After the initial shock, his face had grown calm, serene even. He watched Lea smash each piece of glass into smaller and smaller fragments, watched her grind the shattered pieces into powder with the heel of her shiny patent-leather shoes, watched her pick out the small shards embedded in the fleshy base of her hand.

  Then, when she was done at last, as she looked at him with a defiant, insane exhilaration, he pulled out his tablet from his pocket. He would do what was right. He would help Lea. Todd pressed his lips together as he prepared to write it all down.

  FIFTEEN

  Lea had expected the Observers to show up at her apartment after she kicked Todd out, but so far, they hadn’t. Still, she had been on edge all week.

  So when George clapped his meaty paw on her shoulder in greeting at WeCovery, she shrank away in visible irritation. His hand was left hanging midair, a look of awkward confusion clouding his features.

  “Hi,” Lea said with a bright smile. “Hi.” She gave a stiff wave to the rest of the group.

  They nodded and mumbled greetings. No one met her eye except for the bread-faced woman, the one with the husband. Greg. Susan—that was her name. The bandage on her little finger was gone now, and her toothy smile seemed to suggest she was in high spirits.

  George took his place in the circle. Lea noticed for the first time that he had a different chair—while theirs were white folding chairs, his was made of polished pine. “So.” He straightened up, clapped his hands together. “Gratitude session.”

  Silence. Only Susan was nodding furiously, her lips parted as if the words were on the tip of her tongue.

  “You guys know the drill,” George went on, scanning their faces. He caught Lea’s eye. “Don’t worry, Lea, it’s exactly what it sounds like. We talk about something we’re grateful for this week, to remind ourselves why we are here. Simple, really. But the hardest things to do are the simple ones.”

  Susan had leaned forward so much that she was practically falling off her seat. Without waiting for George to call on her, she started going on in a high, breathless voice: “I am grateful for so many things, so many, really! But of course the main thing, if I had to pick just one thing of course, that would be Greg. Not that I’m saying he’s a thing, of course.” She let out a high-pitched giggle that made Ambrose wince.

  “Uh-huh. Greg, yes, great.” Was she imagining it or was there a hint of impatience in George’s voice? Lea shot him a quick glance. But no—he looked as earnest and well-meaning as ever.

  “He’s just an angel, really. I guess you all know that already, since you all know about my Fateful Day. How he got down on his hands and knees to clean it all up. Took him hours. But I don’t want to bore you with the details again. You’ve all heard this so many times. There are other things, though, like how he always remembers to charge my tablet when I’m asleep, so he can send me sweet text messages through the day. Or how he installed that location tracker on my tab, just in case it got stolen. You never know, these days. He jokes it’s in case I get kidnapped. Ha, ha. Who’d ever kidnap a big old lump like me? Ha. But that’s Greg. Always kidding around…”

  Susan went on for another five minutes, her nostrils flaring, barely pausing for a breath. Her face grew more and more animated as she spoke, until it was contorted into an ecstatic, fevered mask. A slow revulsion began to build in Lea’s stomach. But she couldn’t look away. Lea tried not to think about what she and Susan shared.

  Then all of a sudden, Susan was done. Her mouth was still open, but she had run out of words. A strange look crossed her face as she pressed her lips together slowly. A long breath escaped her, like the air from a balloon.

  After a moment of heavy silence, George seemed to come to, saying briskly: “Great, perfect, tha
nk you, Susan. Shall we keep going? Lots to do today, lots to do.”

  A small, dark man with a trim mustache went next. His name was Archie; he was grateful for sunrises, the way they always surprised you, bleeding out into the sky in that wild, uncontrolled way.

  “Very good, Archie. Natural beauty, that’s a big one. But please remember, for next time, the ‘B’ word.” George inclined his eyebrows toward Archie.

  They kept going. Family was a common theme (“Heartening, truly heartening, in this day and age,” George said, beaming), beauty again, and then some other epithets about hope, choice, the future. When it came around to Lea’s turn, she bit down on her lower lip and mumbled something about her fiancé and their future offspring. She tried not to look as George typed something into his tablet.

  “Pair work?” George announced, gleefully pushing up his glasses, leaving a fat fingerprint on the left lens. He didn’t seem to notice. “All right, guys. I’ve heard you. We’ve all heard you. Now, talk to each other. Ready, set, go.”

  The two on either side of Lea, Ambrose and another man who always spoke with a stuffed nose, turned away from her. She sat awkwardly, hands clasped in her lap. George was preoccupied with Susan, who was now whispering furiously at him, stabbing one finger into the empty air.

  No one was looking at Lea. They all seemed absorbed in the activity. She shifted, trying to ignore the feeling of being left out. She wanted to be left out, she reminded herself. The WeCovery Group was hardly the kind of club she was dying to be a part of.

  The “D” word. Lea let out a small snort.

  “Lea. Glad to see you smiling again. It must be all those grateful feelings,” George boomed at her. Susan was still whispering behind him, apparently deaf to all else. He ignored her, instead watching Lea, a satisfied, catlike grin on his face. His eyes were flinty behind the glasses.

  She looked away from him, the laugh freezing on her face. Her gaze flitted from the mustard carpet to the chipped wooden plaques hanging stubbornly on the walls to that small, clouded window on the far side of the room. The room felt smaller all of a sudden, despite all that empty space.