“Why’d she write ten of them?”
I mumbled about a tactile-performative statement.
“So it’s art because there’s ten of them.”
Does the Aesthetic Hypothesis boil down to this? I decided to worry about that another time. When Nabi spoke again, there was something in her voice.
“You’re saying her death is like the Mona Lisa. Like a Britney Spears song.”
“No, not clichéd. The opposite.”
“Like that book about the dinosaur who found a place where books can walk around like spiders?”
“Well, no.”
“You said that book was the greatest, most original story you ever read.”
“Well, yeah, nikkou, but—”
“So, best-case scenario, this woman’s suicide is like a story of a dinosaur in a place where one-eyed goblin-thingys build underground libraries. Both great art, right?”
“There’s more to it than that.”
“Of course there is, sweet genius. But not the way you think. Baby, I don’t know about this project, it’s too weird.”
I started to argue, but I wasn’t well equipped; it was easy for her to hush me, cuddle me against the pillows, whisper, “It’s not good for you.”
She didn’t mean my first good idea since T. rex ruled the planet was no good. I didn’t reply. Nabi smoothed my brow and said, “I didn’t mean it like that, baby. Just try a different subject. I mean, ten suicide notes? Whatever Aetna Simmons wanted to achieve, don’t you think we’re a little too sane to understand? I’m kidding, baby, don’t look at me like that. What can anybody say? What happened to her is sad and creepy, and that’s it. Come with me into town, give your brain an airing-out. After that, come back, sit down, and you’ll come up with something else.”
She kissed me before I could remark on the flaws in her reasoning.
I passed the day on bin watch. It involved loading forklifts, watching colored lights turn on, and not seeing or touching the documents inside the heavy-duty plastic bins. We have two trucks that take the bins to customers and pick them up. The whole time they’re with the customers, the bins stay locked. They have narrow mouths like stingrays’; they can slurp just a couple pages at a time. Overall tamper-proof. When the bins come back to us, only the keycard-protected forklifts in Max Sec can unlock them. And that happens only when the forklifts raise the bins up high above our reach in the instant before turning them upside down, dumping their contents in the dumper that conveys them to the conveyor that damns them to their doom.
At lunchtime we previewed our first TV ad. Still photographs of the Bermuda Day Parade with idgits in backward baseball caps throwing confetti. Live action now: some kid picks up a piece of the confetti, shows it to his momma, who sees that it’s a piece of someone’s horizontally strip-shredded financial record. “This is somebody’s financial record!” she exclaims. Only idgits strip-shred horizontally. Only the uninformed strip-shred at all. Momma looks shocked. She shows the confetti to her acegirl, who stands next to her; acegirl shows it to her husband, who looks bamboozled at the sky; and the woman next to him peeks at the tiny strip of paper over his shoulder.
Kid addresses camera. “Chingas, people! This is just fullish! Don’t let this happen to you. Let the pros [pron., de pröse] deal wif it. Call Bull’s Head Shreds. It’s thur job [heavy dipthong] to keep you and ya customers secure. And they recycle everything [arryding]. You ask me [pron., ax], it’s a no-brainer. Bull’s Head Shreds got you covered.” The screen fills with our logo and contact information.
It’s not bad. For Bermuda. Probably as good as we’ll get. It really happened too, only it was New York, not Bermuda, and the confetti was made from police records. I mention it because strip-shredded confetti is a worthy analogue for the mess I’ve made of my existence.
I began to hate Aetna Simmons’ Final Words: Suicide and Suicide Notes as Works of Art. It was missing something. Some days, I saw this as a challenge. Assured of my prowess as a virtuoso of research and prose (PhD), reassured by the happenstance that Nabi would be over in the evening, I thought on such days, Lad, with thy dazzling quill thou wilt illuminate the cave of life and death and make record of thine insights, and journals everywhere will covet thine insights and elevate them on golden wings.
Other days, especially weekends, the futility of things was pungent and disgraceful. I despised all my clients and loathed my computer, indifferent even to my automotive pride and joy. I needed medication to cope with the bleakness and the pressure of the pointlessness of work.
We’re too sane to understand, Nabi said. When it comes to suicide, we are a priori incapable of saying anything beyond the obvious. She might’ve hit on something there. Even though she only has an AD from the College. In my research I came upon an author (an Austrian who killed himself with sleeping pills, thereby securing his credibility on the matter) who wrote that suicidal reasoning is beyond the reach of every form of language. This is because language—consisting selectively of the meanings, arrangements, and deployments of words—works the way it does on the assumption that the reason people speak to one another is survival. We think, communicate, and give a damn just because we want to live. Life is the goal of all goals. We desire it above all else. Unless of course we don’t.
Then everything turns upside down. Not in the sense of an upended roller coaster that keeps everything intact in compliance with the latest safety regulations but in the sense of an inverted fish tank without a roof. Everything shatters into an unintelligible mess. Every condition of being, like weightlessness and oxygen, spills out from underneath the world. Living becomes impossible, so communication is impossible. Words become impossible. The being for whom living is impossible, the suicidal intellect, therefore cannot be narrated or explained.
If this is correct, then a true interpretation of Aetna Simmons’ writings is impossible, and my project was futile from the start. Maybe I knew that, just never thought about it. Or I kept on because I knew.
I sat in my leather chair by my Tiffany lamp at my seriously antique rolltop desk. Here in my private study, as in my living room, books govern the walls on custom-built, floor-to-ceiling cedar shelving complete with rolling ladders. The south-facing walls are windows bringing me the evanescent sea, shaggy casurina tops, and the salty breezes carving holes in the cliffs.
I googled Aetna Simmons. I learned there are six urologists in Simmons Place, Tennessee, who accept Aetna Health Insurance. I tried Bermuda Aetna Simmons. I found the earliest news stories on her disappearance. Ms. Simmons is reported as having “dark” features and no distinguishing body marks.
When the police lost interest, so did everybody else. She wasn’t on Facebook, wasn’t in the phone book. Good thing I have contacts. Lawyers, doctors, MPs, VPs, CEOs, bank people, church people, tech people, smart people who realize it’s in their best interest to do what I say without asking questions. HSBC even has a guy I can speak to in Japanese. He and I comprise about fifty percent of Bermuda’s Japanese-speaking population, so confidentiality isn’t an issue. I texted the guy. He never knew Aetna Simmons. But he found her abandoned bank account in his computer. SIMMONS AETNA P.
On an irregular basis, Aetna received transfers from some numbered US dollar accounts in Grand Cayman and made top-ups to a local prepaid cellphone. She hadn’t done either in some time. Her last electronic payout was to BELCO, her final light bill shockingly low at $148.57. Three days later, she spent $42.52 at Supermart, leaving behind a balance of about two Gs in her account and a supermarket’s worth of people who didn’t recognize her name. Another week or so, and Mrs. Trimm was griping to Inspector Saltus.
But if Aetna had time to settle up with BELCO and buy groceries, why didn’t she make a down payment on her last month’s rent? Some token payout might’ve discouraged Mrs. Trimm from so expeditiously raising the alarm over her $4,800.
$4,800 a month. In St.
George’s. That cottage must’ve been more like a townhouse: two bedrooms and den, I thought, renovated with amenities and probably a view, which according to her almost nonexistent money trail Aetna almost never left until she left forever. Completely boring person, said the HSBC guy, never even went out to dinner. Unless of course she had accounts at other banks.
But my contacts at Clarien and Butterfield came up empty. She must’ve had money abroad, I thought, otherwise she’d never have taken that cottage. Do the math. The incoming transfers were of inconsistent amounts that approximated ten grand each. She got six such transfers every year on an irregular schedule with dry spells in between that sometimes went on for months. Perhaps the Cayman accounts were her own.
In my flat jam-packed with silence, I came upon an intriguing conclusion: Aetna’s income was like mine. That’s why she kept it hidden, bouncing between islands.
Consultant, she wrote. It’s really not so farfetched. Consider the pharmaceutical broker, who’s as much of a psychologist, marriage counselor, legal aide, and financial consultant as he is a therapist of another kind.
That put a new spin on things. Successful criminals must be consummate pretenders.
Take AS2. Aetna creates the impression she’s got everything covered. She wants readers to have no doubts about her sanity. If living is boring and distasteful, here is someone who respectfully returns her ticket. Far from resentful, she looks forward to turning her back on everything. No, really. What happens to her next could be anything at all and she’ll have no say in the matter. What could be more intellectually stimulating? She even seems to anticipate some vague form of physical pleasure from the transition into a corpse.
You could say AS2 is a misguided attempt at what they call a First Form Suicide Note. But you’d be wrong. AS2 does intimate isolation, hint at a lifetime of failure, and suggest Aetna’s failures weren’t entirely her fault, blaming instead the inexorability of change. All this is typical in a First Form note. However, where are the feelings of isolation? Does she just forget to beg for forgiveness? She doesn’t even mention any specific problems. None of these omissions are typical. And change is every problem, not a specific problem. In AS2, the final change is also the solution. Clearly some confusion here.
It boils down to this. At this point, Aetna can’t admit dead equals gone. Your-corpse-qua-fish-food is nonequivalent to you-qua-you until you unequivocally change the definition of you from, e.g., brilliant but unappreciated scholar and love artist with a connoisseur’s tastes to nothing; because fish food isn’t anything except a means of energizing fish, and the existence of fish can’t lay claim to any more of a point than your existence can. Or mine, for that matter.
But Aetna isn’t ready for that kind of humility. That Salvation Army crack like she thinks no one’s going to care; it excuses her self-pity while at the same time she assumes a swarm of buzzards around everything she has, and it’s a matter of pride, giving her corpse to the bugs instead. Scrambling for self-worth, she homes in on death like a coke fiend with her nose in a packet of Splenda.
And yet AS2 displays a rare sensitivity. Metaphysical, ecological, almost too philosophical for a genuine suicide note.
That’s probably because it isn’t a genuine suicide note. What’s a suicide note but a promise?
Don’t tell me you don’t know anyone who’s made promises they never meant to keep. Maybe they wanted to mean it, but they don’t have it in them. It might require something too formidable for them to wrap their minds around, in which case all the best intentions in the world wouldn’t add up to sincerity. AS2 might be this way. Or it could be a baldfaced sham. In terms of suicidal authenticity, a few among the Ten are questionable.
Where’d I learn the difference between a fake suicide note and a truthful one? Google. Where else? Suicidologists have spent decades on this question. Their best-known experiments compared “real” suicide notes, written by people who actually ended their own lives, with three kinds of “fake” note. Fakes included notes by “noncompleters” who threatened suicide but never went through with it, notes by “attempters” who tried to get the job done but wound up botching it, and notes written at the experimenters’ request by nonsuicidal volunteers.
The studies concluded that both genuine and false note writers dole out full helpings of blame and guilt as they try to rationalize their decision to die. The sincere and uncommitted both look forward to death as some kind of release. But real suicide notes howl with anger and despair; desperation pours from them as from open wounds. They paint the suicidal plunge in hopeless and defiant smears. Fake notes may be emotional, but they describe the decision to die as a practical choice. Quick fix for financial woes, legal troubles, or failure and stagnation, as in AS2. Fakes shy away from the word death, preferring implications (AS2: once-in-a-lifetime opportunity). Real notes say it like they mean it because they really do.
These distinctions are stylistic. They’re subjective. Unreliable. According to suicidologists, only one thing separates truly suicidal documents from deliberate or inadvertent feints and does it with the surety of a guillotine. A to-do list.
Water my plants; lawyer’s phone number is X; safety deposit box is whatever; burn my Thomas Hardy books with me or I will haunt you till you die. Last-ditch impositions of this sort are key. Real notes have them, fake ones don’t. Why?
A to-do list addressed to someone other than oneself signifies one’s intention to go elsewhere. You’re going out, the cleaner’s coming in, you leave a note. If the plumber calls, please let him in. You send memos to your staff. Turn OFF shredder at end of day!!! You make lists for other people to take care of when you know you won’t be around to do it.
Morbid thoughts do strike people who are sad enough to write them down but lack the determination to grasp their meaning. But to-do lists don’t occur to such waffling melancholics because although they are depressed, they fail to grasp the fact that suicide means never coming home. Which means they’re not ready for it. Fakes might be desperate, but if they can’t imagine the world without them in it, they’ll blow their cover by omission.
AS2’s a good attempt but not quite good enough. The Salvation Army thing isn’t an item on a list; it’s a conditional statement, not an imperative. It mentions no specific articles, which vagary gives it the timbre of a jest.
But if you think the distinction’s clear-cut, you’ve got the wrong impression. Like suicide itself, which overturns the ultimate priority, the science of suicide is beset by contradictions. For instance, it is clear to suicidologists that real notes are longer than fake ones and less likely to convey positive emotions. It’s equally clear that fake notes are longer than real ones and more likely to avoid positive expressions. Those researchers who insist on the to-do list as a mark of suicidal authenticity are just as confident as those who posit that authentic suicides just want everyone to forget they ever existed.
To make matters worse, as one study pointed out, suicidologists too often assume that suicide notes reveal their authors’ actual psychological states and sincere feelings even when authors knowingly or unconsciously try to conceal them. People who fall prey to this assumption overlook the reason why suicide notes have so much impact: they’re written to be read. Every suicide note is a chance for an author to present an artificial self-image. In nineteenth-century Europe, newspapers published suicide notes. How many of those last campaigns did what they had to do to make their authors look like saints? My bet would be all of them.
I wonder if Aetna Simmons drafted and redrafted because she had no idea who she wanted to be. Drafting identities like dress patterns, trying them on, all at the last minute. Not realizing she’d lied until the next draft came along. Unaware that sometimes she was faking.
Or was she unaware? How innocent is a life lived in painstaking secrecy?
The idea that Aetna might’ve been a criminal was appealing. It set my imagination to ra
cing through dark landscapes, cavorting unrestrainedly with what-ifs, flirting rashly with if-only. It made me a high-res portrait. A dark, dark woman, tall with tiny hips and round, juicy breasts and long fingers and a swarm of black curls, perfect, airbrushed flesh. Eyes like the bottom of the sea. A woman who feared no shadow because shadow was where she lived, where she was made. And she loved darkness because it defied the bright, impudent world. And so she was ever free. Her time was unconstrained, the space in which she moved flexed and flowed with her body because that was how she constructed them. Freedom and resolve were her meticulous creations. She cultivated them as they nourished her to the end.
Nabi, on the other hand. My nikkou does the AIDS walk, the cancer walks, the End To End for charity. Tag days, bake sales, visiting at Westmeath. She volunteers at the Ag Show. Sings in the choir at Mount Olive AME, where she and Martin are in charge of the Sunday Bible Study Group. If she has something you need, she’ll worry until she can give it to you. If she mislays an invoice, she asks God to help her find it.
But at Bull’s Head Shreds, the managing partner won’t stand for no nonsense. Wayneesha and those lot, drivers, suppliers, even customers; they try any bullshit, Nabi gives them what for. It’s not easy for her; she’s timid at heart. That makes her admirable.
Also terrifying. That timidity, I think it’s why she won’t leave Martin; she’s too timid to hurt him or weather talk. It chills me to the bone, for I never know when timidity might transmute into terror, overcome her, rip her away from me. The question of a long drop opening up before me.
I’m a skilla when it comes to grinning through chronic anxiety. Nabi never sees it. Years of practice, you know. Practice being afraid of Nabi being afraid. Are the pills any wonder when you think about it? If Nabi did see it, then what? She’d giggle and say bye get crackin, stop ya noize.
Look at this shit. I’m so used to living like this I’m stuck in present tense, you notice?
Drafts of a Suicide Note Page 4
