Hadn’t seen that bye in donkey’s. I mean Erik. The 4 of us got on well as kids, but the brothers by themselves? Lord have mercy. I mean, they’re sweeties, but the mouth on Erik, Lord, come on. Ya boy’s always chopsin away, I don’t care where we are, his mouth is carrying on. One day Daddy took us all down St David’s to that ice cream place, & even he just couldn’t take it. K elbowed E & said, “Shut ya mouth, bye, chingas, no one cares about ya gossip.”
“Dis what you call gossip is de national passtime, brah,” said E.
“Let’s drop you at de Flagpole, then. You address de nation while we lot go greezin.”
Iesha & me almost died laughing, but I’m serious, E never stops. At the same time (you wouldn’t expect this & I love my Baby all the same), the only humility in that family belongs to E. Except, just like his brother, aceboy knows he’s a cutie. E got his momma’s light skin, he dyes his nappy hair brown with reddish highlights like what’s trendy in Japan, skipping around in HD color while Kenji, my tall, dark genius, takes on the whole world in black. Bush of springy-satiny black curls, smooth black arms like the best nights out on the ocean, fingers like kisses of shadows. & his delicate lips, his fine & slender nose. Eyes like Crystal Caves. I could stare into those eyes till the Lord decides to wipe the world away!
But! Sigh. I’m writing about Erik. When I asked E why he’s anxious to talk to K, E said it’d been 3 years since they last spoke. I think he was ashamed. He told stories from their childhood. I knew all of them already, I’m BEEN heard them byes’ stories. Story of E’s name. He got a Western name cuz their daddy got tired of explaining Kenji’s name, but their momma said they really needed Japanese names, so poor E wound up double-hyphened. Stories of the “categories of the understanding” (that’s what K calls them): “assumptions whereby” K = erratic & selfish, E = dependable & respectful. Their momma held each brother up as a model for the other, thinking it’d teach them to adore each other. (That’s what I think she thought, but K said it was more like cockfighting.) She scolded them like, Why can’t you be helpful/learn to think like your brother? & their daddy was no help. Distant, said E. Vacant, said K.
“It ruined both of us, mochi-chan,” said Erik. He calls everybody mochi.
Story of K bullying E with too-long words, E went crying to his momma. She’d always believe him. I was there for some of that.
“That’s my Momma-sama, she knew I was in the right, I mean here’s Kiki doing like he’s told, doing his sharing & all that, while the King of Bad (Kenji) is whining like an ingrate, making trouble.”
How’d E start calling himself Kiki? Hm. Can’t remember. I do remember Kenji calling his brother a “sycophant” with “a tendency to lie in wait.”
“Kenji made like everything he did & thought was too sophisticated for the rest of us (well yeah, that’s what genius means, & I’m been heard this story too). He said people laughed at me behind my back cuz my only talent was ‘obsequiousness.’ Try accusing a 10-yr-old of obsequiousness. But when Mr Shakespeare (Kenji) announced he wasn’t joining CAM, an MBA wasn’t good enough for him, he had to have a doctorate, knowing full well he had a duty to the family & failing to do his duty meant shaming himself & the family? I don’t think so, honeybunny, I mean, that just took the cake right there. ‘Life is for one generation, but a good name is forever.’”
Erik says Japanese proverbs like a pastor reads his Bible. Kenji says there’s nothing so perverse as proverbs. I remember the day war broke out over “shame & duty.” Kenji was @USA doing his BA. He called me right after he hung up on his momma, so angry I worried he was gonna try & crash into a train. Erik said he (Kenji) was fooling himself in general but I scolded him (E) for sneering. Just cuz K isn’t published doesn’t mean he in’t a genius, I said. He’s before his time, I said. He wants to write what no one has the guts to think about, that’s what I said. E said, “That’s all well & good, if it’s true (!), but it leaves it up to Kiki to step up to the plate & take full responsibility for following in our parents’ footsteps regardless of the cost.”
Gotta give him that: Momma-sama comes 1st. But I’m sorry to say it made E a tattler, & Good Jesus knows the mouth on dat bye, which is why Erik knows ONLY that K’s my BFF. Lord have mercy, can you imagine?! When we were kids, Mrs C always knew things she shouldn’t or seemed to draw conclusions without evidence, & every time Erik was the missing link. He made things up sometimes, K & I knew it but couldn’t prove it, & Erik didn’t seem to need to. So even when Mrs C had the details all mixed up, she’d send me home & make K go to his room while E sat there grinning. My Baby grew up thinking everything he did was wrong, even malicious. I tried to defend him, but Mrs C assumed since K was my BFF I was lying.
Anyway, Erik: “At least Kiki knows how to see things thru. You know Kiki-chan will always be there for you, mochi, like he’ll be there for his Momma-sama, his daddy, & his prodigal brother no matter what he says. Cuz you know, mochi-chan, one day Kenji’s gonna need somebody in his corner cuz that inflated head of his lives up in the clouds, & if you don’t mind my saying so, stuck up his own _____. (Me: Excuse me?!) OK, wrong words, maybe, but you know what I mean, Nabilah-chan, you trust Kiki.”
Poor Kiki. Kenji will prbly accuse him of fishing for some kind of info, but the truth is he needs Kenji & wants Kenji to need him back. But like any bye (sigh!), the man won’t just come out & say it! I should try to help them. There’s so much warping of perspective going on, it might take a miracle. You up for it, Lord?
So there I was, tracking Clocktower through cyberspace and running from a semi-animate poltergeist. Having torn myself away from Clocktower’s homepage, I turned one dark virtual corner after another. I stumbled on Tom Bukhari and Macy Moran in a bunch of old news articles and public case files.
Tom and Macy are dead. Fully dead.
Tom died in an accident ten years ago. Heading to work on the New Jersey Turnpike, his Benz was the loser in an altercation with a Mack truck and heavy fencing.
He was a stockbroker who’d beaten gastric cancer. Surgery, chemo, and more surgery, only to die under the back end of a truck, cancer-free.
In his system they found low concentrations of a sleep aid. Not enough to kill. Hell, it wasn’t enough for a full night’s sleep. Tom only needed four hours; he cut his sleeping pill in half every night. But his insurance company dismissed the findings of the coroner, who admitted that dead bodies never look stoned. Tom could’ve been higher than a satellite when he died and his carcass would’ve insisted on “low concentrations.” So it was easy for the insurance company to envision a cancer-wrought paroxysm of depression in which Tom tried to kill himself with an overdose of pills. When that didn’t work, he’d gotten in his car, perhaps in hope of leading a caravan of pilgrims to St. Peter.
Suicide doesn’t pay, said the insurers. They refused to give Tom’s widow the two million in “death benefits” to which she was entitled. The company claimed that by taking his own life, Tom voided his insurance contract.
Did I mention Tom was insured with Clocktower? Not that it matters in the grand scheme of things. All life insurers do it. Call it the suicide defense. By killing yourself, you defend them from having to pay out on your policy. It’s called a suicide exemption clause, and it’s legal almost everywhere: if you arrange your own demise within two years of signing up for life insurance, your insurers won’t be liable for a penny. The idea is to prevent people from cutting their own throats before the ink’s dry on their policies. Apparently poor people think that’s a good way of providing for their families.
Tom’s insurance policy was thirty years old when he died. As longspun and lovingly tended as his marriage to Sadira. Clocktower invoked the suicide clause anyway because most of the time, the suicide defense works. Who’d bother trying to wrestle an insurance company over one guy’s policy?
Nobody. Just his widow. In a contest between a widow and a fa
celess corporate entity, do not put your money on the widow.
Overwhelmed with grief and shock, alone with nothing but the tears she poured into the vacant pillow at her side, Sadira insisted that Tom couldn’t have killed himself. The guy died in a car accident. Cancer-free. Those things were indisputable. And Sadira swore she’d never seen Tom get depressed, not even when his illness was at its worst. She argued with Clocktower for two years.
She tried, anyway. They gave her the runaround, ignored her letters, quit taking her calls. In the miraculous event that she got to speak to somebody, she had to remind them who her husband was and what had happened. Relive it, in other words. The cancer, the accident, the postmortem, again and again. Clocktower figured all they had to do was wait. Grief would wither her until she forgot that she was right.
They underestimated her. Sadira got a lawyer instead of giving up. Clocktower’s legal department knew they had no case. Those two years, they were just bluffing. Sadira’s lawyer and the judge saw through it. But between Tom’s death and the arrival of the check, three years wandered away. In those long years, Clocktower squeezed the widow’s two million, invested it, made money on it. So when all was said and done, the company made a profit.
There’s only one reason they’re not fighting to this day. Clocktower couldn’t prove Tom wanted to die on the Turnpike that morning.
It wasn’t just the physical evidence. You want to think that stuff is objective, but it isn’t. You could read that half a pill as one night’s sleep or as a major underestimation of those pills. As for the car, Tom was alone. He’d never talked about suicide before, but who knows what he was thinking?
Proof of intent. It simply wasn’t there.
Things worked out differently for Sisi Moran. Not too long ago, her mother Macy, a socialite and something of a bombshell, went sailing with three friends off the coast of Florida. A squall came out of nowhere, capsizing the grossly wealthy twenty-somethings. Coast Guard picked up three of them, the ocean claimed their luxury pocket cruiser. Sometime later, Macy washed ashore, looking like a barracuda’s breakfast.
Macy may seem immature if you consider her priorities (parties, clothes, men, and parties), but as the single mom of a three-year-old she did have some sense of responsibility. Enough to buy life insurance just after Sisi was born. That kid should’ve had a million bucks to roll around in. Instead, she got nothing.
In Florida, life insurance companies don’t have to settle for two years. Suicide exemption clauses can legally remain in force forever. Hence Clocktower’s party-line. Macy insisted on sailing even though the forecast warned of dangerous marine conditions. At best an inexpert sailor, she persuaded her friends to let her steer the boat. All in fun till the wind came up and she refused to turn back. Strange? So’s the fact that only one person eluded the Coast Guard.
All four mariners put on life jackets. All, Macy included, were capable swimmers. So her death makes no sense. Unless she made sure that she would not be saved.
Burden of proof lay with Clocktower. How did they prove Macy wanted to die?
Physical evidence? There wasn’t any (barracudas, etc.). Her friends didn’t know if she swam toward the sinking boat or away from it. They were busy trying to stay alive in open ocean in a storm. Yes, they’d seen the weather reports, but Macy was loath to postpone the sailing trip because her three-month South-Pacific vacation was imminent. Her friends were adamant: all she wanted was to maximize her time with them before she went. Nobody believed there’d actually be squalls; weather reports are always wrong. Sure she took the wheel, but someone else took over when things started to look bad. It wasn’t Macy’s boat, for Christ’s sake. It wasn’t true that she’d refused to turn back; they’d all agreed. She was a strong swimmer but the storm was stronger. That wasn’t her fault. So much for physical evidence.
In any case, intent is a state of mind. Psychological autopsy, they call it: reconstructing the deceased’s personality, relationships, and final days with an eye to clarifying her motives and intentions. It meant interviewing everyone who might’ve been close to Macy and hoping they didn’t lie. A million good reasons why anyone might lie on behalf of an orphan.
But that kid was her own undoing. According to Clocktower, Sisi was the motive. Macy took her own life because of her three-year-old daughter.
After all, Macy herself was young. Accustomed to fast living, she found her world upended by a kid come out of nowhere. Squirming, shrieking, seeping, seething little hellion who, neighbors attest, strained Macy’s patience until the young mother burst into tears of despair. A child who therefore had to make do with a live-in nanny at all hours of the day and night. Macy’s nerves were shot; she had to take not one but two strangers into her house, life as she knew it was over, and everyone expected her to be happy about it. There was one way out and Macy took it.
Clocktower’s investigators based this version of events on interviews with the nanny and Macy’s neighbors. Those who survived the storm told a somewhat different story. Macy, they said, was little more than a child herself, and maybe she could be melodramatic, but she loved that kid. She did her best to make sure Sisi would have a decent life no matter what happened, and if you don’t think that little girl deserves it, you’re etc.
Two conflicting stories. Public outrage building in Miami, pressuring the courts to do something about greedy bastards ganging up on toddlers. And then the nanny found Macy’s suicide note. A pink envelope sticking out from underneath a dresser, a private dresser in the nanny’s private room. Macy had been dead almost two months.
The nanny reasoned that the note had been on top of the dresser but fallen and slipped underneath. Though it was pink and only partially concealed, she’d managed not to notice it till long after Macy had fairly decomposed. Sisi got the blame for that too, by the way. She was so exhausting that the nanny sleepwalked through those two traumatic months. According to NBC, the note said things like: It’s not her fault but it’s only the beginning and I’m already all used up. I’m not me anymore. I’ve already stopped living. I’ll let her down but that is nothing new. She’ll be better off without me.
It was enough. Believing her existence was just a living death, Macy meant to subtract herself from Sisi’s life once and for all. One way or another, she meant to die, and in the storm she saw a chance to make it look accidental. She wanted to do right by her little girl. In a good mother that is only natural. But she still intentionally violated the terms of her insurance policy. If it weren’t for the suicide exemption set forth in said terms, Clocktower’s remaining customers would’ve had to shoulder higher premiums so the company could afford to honor high-priced claims like Miss Moran’s. Suicide exemption clauses protect the living from the imprudence of the dead.
No judge could force the company to give Sisi anything. Not in Florida. For lawyers, juries, and judges, a suicide note is conclusive evidence. Proof of intent doesn’t come any stronger. Soon as that nanny stumbled on that paper corner, every legal threat vanished from Clocktower’s horizon. So why did the note take two months to come to light? Is it a coincidence that it appeared just as an enraged public and bloodthirsty media began to try to muscle Sisi’s case toward the courts?
We’ll never know. I’ve never liked toddlers, so those questions didn’t interest me. My concerns were literary. I wondered who wrote Macy’s suicide note.
No one talked about it. Not to the sensationalistic online sources which, for this mere civilian, were the only sources. But someone must’ve sent that note to a forensic document examiner.
Questions such as: Was it Macy’s handwriting? Did she have access to pink envelopes? Was she the type to say let down or would she have gone with disappoint? Was this really a suicide note per se? Could it have been an excerpt from a diary, not a promise but a private outburst of frustration with the outburst as its own sole purpose? Was Macy really ready to die, or was this a cry for help? Di
d her words mean something more than what they seemed to say?
Faking. It happens. How hard is it to imagine pretending to want to die? You could start over somewhere. I could forget the charade I’ve made out of my life.
As for pretending to want to die on behalf of someone else, Clocktower had plenty of reasons to get someone to do this, and by tacit industry standards it wouldn’t have been unethical. Policies get rescinded all the time for fabricated violations. Invented illnesses, events that never took place, a headache becomes an overdose, a storm becomes a suicide. Why not? I happen to know that people are always in the market for illusions.
The belated appearance of Macy’s suicide note is rather convenient, don’t you think? The sentiments are genuine. Suicidologists say that when someone decides her absence will make her dependents “better off,” that’s a sure sign of intent. It could also be the mark of a creative writer who knows how to do research.
Say Macy wasn’t the writer. And Clocktower prepared that note, planted it when things got sticky. And a little pink envelope saved a million bucks plus profit potential. Do you feel a new hypothesis coming on?
If only Tom Bukhari had left a suicide note. That sneaky widow of his would’ve never had the chance to bleed the company of two million. Their legal department could’ve kept the suit tied up in court, held out indefinitely, arguing unresolvable questions.
Interesting that Clocktower hasn’t made the news since Macy. Other insurers have. Usually because of lawsuits over unpaid death benefits or unfairly rescinded policies. I’m talking Allstate. I’m talking Prudential and State Farm. On the losing end of a class action, MetLife paid out five hundred million in death claims that should’ve been honored years before. So it seems Clocktower is doing something right.
Drafts of a Suicide Note Page 6
