Drafts of a Suicide Note

by Wong, Mandy-Suzanne

  To my friends: my work is done. Why wait?

  Concise, effective, beautiful. The poise and careful emptiness of minimalism.

  Eastman’s note is easy to find online. Famous as the man himself, if not more so. To an aspiring virtuoso of the form, Eastman’s piece would’ve been an inspiration.

  Or a stumbling block. AS3 is too close to derivative. That could raise flags.

  It’s a fragment, that’s what I think. An unfinished draft included in the Ten as evidence of her painstaking, frustrating process, which itself played a role in her journey toward voluntary death.

  That’s assuming she used the scissors just for kicks.

  

  Honey texted me a picture of a bichon frise, so cute, I printed it & put it in my book. Pretty silly for someone like me to keep a book. Especially around byes like M & K. Course I wasn’t always “someone like me” (too late to stop me now!) & remember my book started cuz of K in the 1st place. He brought it all the way from Italy, where the O-Cs were stopping on their way home from Tokyo 20 yrs ago (mercy, how time goes!). He wrote “cuz good ideas should survive” in it & got himself a matching one. He said all great writers practice on themselves. But Baby gave up on his, he was writing so much else at college, he was just too busy. So I don’t know where my book’s twin went, but I was hooked by then. Honey sneers at it, he says only silly tweenies worry about their “Dear Diary.” I told him the thing about great writers & he said he’s just got time for the Greatest Of The Greatest, The Good Book, he’s prbly got a point. I think K forgot my book exists. Well both of that’s just fine with me. Not like anybody’d ever have a chance to sneak a peek cuz my book rides with me & I mean everywhere in the Louis Infini Porte-Documents Jour K got me to celebrate our opening at Bull’s Head, & that briefcase locks & I never let it out of my sight, Amen.

  But some things can’t be written down. Sing it with me, book: NABILAH DO NOT WRITE THAT IN YOUR BOOK. It’s not as easy as that, is it. Not putting it in writing doesn’t make it go away. But it does help, right? I mean, not putting it means nobody can see it, so it’s easier for people to think it’s not there, & that makes all the difference. Like how Baby says people forget it’s even possible for half-Japanese half-African Bermudians to exist cuz people who think in checkboxes refuse to write “we’re stumped.” (He says “Other” means “not here, not with us,” it doesn’t mean “we’re stumped,” it means “let’s kick out whoever makes us worry that we’re stumped.” Sigh!) Come to think of it, I’m sorta sounding like my Baby, innit. I mean the latest thing he wrote (!). At least it’s something (Thank You, Jesus) but 10 suicide notes??!! Lord Jesus I mean come on now! Anyway, once I realized there’s no need to worry, he’ll drop it soon enough, I started thinking of the deeper part of what he wrote. I mean yeah, Mona Lisa & the walking books story, but also the idea: “Work Of Art.” & the ideas in that idea.

  I don’t understand everything K wrote (I tried but my sweet genius is too deep for a worker bee), but I think I read in what he wrote: Vanishing takes work.

  It can be pretty work. Like Mona Lisa. It can be sorta silly too like Britney. It can be unique & exciting work like spider-books. It’s thinking work. Not just about pushing stuff into shredders. Not just about forgetting. It’s about changing something into something else. Or at least it can be, right, Lord? It’s about making something happen. Vanishing is an art.

  So there are feelings that go with it. Baby’s right about that. How does vanishing feel? If you let it, it can feel like creation, & NABILAH DON’T SAY ANY MORE ABOUT IT! Suicide is a real different thing from disappearing, you know that too, Nabi-girl, & you know Kenji.

  For a while all I could think of was getting him off the subject forever. I even thought about (Lord have mercy) re-hacking his computer & sending that “essay” of his to Never-Happened Land. Then I thought how crushed Baby would be, how long it’s been since he’s managed to finish something. & at the same time I thought…well, I wasn’t gonna write anything about it, but I can’t stop thinking about it so I’ve gotta tell my book so I don’t do what I really don’t want to do more & more each time I think about it: throw my arms around Kenji & yell I shoulda known, Baby, my secret love, my dark genius, let me show you my shadows & what I made!

  

  Sometimes, under the influence, I wondered if we should stop. If I should be the one to tell Nabi we should stop, what’s done is done. What if we were one of those things she kept doing only because she always had? What if, since we were a kind of backwards nine to five, the night shift of all things, not even a full week, we were never actually “now” as Nabi said: as a hallucination isn’t “now” but is precisely what isn’t happening even as you think it’s happening? Were we just aging skillas pretending to live backwards? Is nostalgia ever enough?

  P1, Warwick Academy. That’s how we met. Nabi noticed that purple was missing from my rainbow. She asked if I wanted to borrow her purple. I said yes and thank you, but it was actually called violet, not purple, in the context of the rainbow. She said, “Well you don’t have to be a smarty pants.” Whereupon I, accustomed to those very words acerbically delivered by my slow-witted brother Erik (Nabi hadn’t met him yet, she had no way of knowing), hung my head and said, “I know.” She asked if I’d like to be friends even though I was a smarty pants, and I said yes. When Friday came, she announced she had permission to invite someone from her brand-new big-kids’ school over to play. She wanted it to be me. Her mom called Masami and off we went.

  You’d think a man lucky enough to marry Nabi, who with a flutter of her lashes can turn a hurricane into a peaceful afternoon, would recognize the boundless potential of commonplace events. But although Martin considers himself latitudinarian, he’s selectively narrow-minded on certain points. He realizes that Nabi would give the clothes off her back to a stranger; but it never occurred to him that giving and gratitude, humdrum forms of satisfaction, might grow and change into something profound and singular. He thinks we’re still just friends in a crayon-sharing kind of way. He thinks, in short, that we’re stuck in P1.

  Soon after I returned from Harvard, the three of us got together for dinner. Mr. Furbert observed my and Nabi’s tendency to giggle like smallies. “It’s like we’re all back in secondary school,” said Martin. “I like that,” he said. “That’s nice,” he added. Martin went to Berkeley, not Warwick, so I don’t know where he got off with this “we” business. It was my duty to point out the serious nature of the partnership that Nabi and I had developed. Look at all we’d achieved at Bull’s Head Shreds.

  What did Martin come back with but the summer team-building program? We fill our establishment with schoolkids to recreate the atmosphere of our own school days; we surround ourselves with children so we can act like them all summer. So he claimed. Nabi almost choked on her virgin piña colada.

  She’s proud of the summer program. She turned a penurious idea of mine (hire kids instead of temps during full-timers’ vacations) into a community service. Together Nabi, Wayneesha, and Bryan teach a ragtag bunch of big-mouthed smallies about teamwork, responsibility, accountability; the vitality of information and documentation; the significance of confidentiality and trust; the importance of security and staying out of trouble. The kids are sixteen-plus, subject to drug tests, background checks, and NAID approval. Remuneration is generous, but problems with gangs or cops will result in termination. Nabi explains all this, makes the hooligans sign contracts, confidentiality agreements, Chain of Custody records just like every employee, just as legal and just as binding. This in’t no supermarket checkout, Nabi tells them; we are handling information that for some powerful customers could mean the difference between poverty and prosperity. For some, like medical offices, we’re their way of complying with very important laws; laws that have to do with privacy, compassion, and the right to be forgotten. As she told Channel Nine, Bull’s Head Shreds had to get a special NAID dispens
ation to hire pre-diploma students in this unique program, which helps young Bermudians prepare for college in ways both tangible and intangible.

  For Martin to toss it off as self-indulgence was just mean.

  This point warrants further remarks. If you don’t understand how Martin is, then the fact that his presence makes things start going shru de trees won’t make any sense.

  Some of it has to do with his profession. His company, Bermuda Risk Management Solutions, offers a Vegas-style buffet’s worth of various services to other corporate types. I don’t know what all those services are. I am not up on the nuances of risk management. I have better things to do than mire myself in Martin’s gory details. I’m aware that he heads a mighty team of “corporate investigators.”

  It’s exactly what it sounds like. He’s a PI for the business world. Say you’re a Fortune 500 conglomerate. You want to hire a corporate cynosure to do some heavy lifting at the executive level. Lest his dazzling résumé blow the fuses on your judgment, you hire BRMS to dive into his shadows before you sign the contract. And that’s not all. Looking to merge with another multinational magnate? Hire BRMS. In case what you took for an Apple turns out to be an Enron. Heading for the courtroom? Let BRMS handle your pre-litigation research. You’ll know you’ve done your homework if they’ve done it for you. Think your CFO’s got some fingers in the jar? Call BRMS. They’ll conduct your fraud investigation with deadly precision and discretion and without setting your employees at each other’s throats. BRMS: fast, neutral, meticulous, and impeccably hush-hush.

  The investigative division consists of several teams like Martin’s. His is the all-star team. He’s team leader, big surprise, with two dozen underlings spread over London, New York, and Hamilton. Nabi claims he knows everyone and everything going on in the business world, even things that no one in their right mind would admit to knowing. You see, everything’s a lead; every lead is some pathetic little animal that Martin’s divinely ordained to hound back to its den wherein other little animals lie cowering. His touch of paranoia whips him on until the lead keels over and dies from exhaustion. The same condition convinced him there’s a market for recorded video chats. So he’d rather spend half his life on airplanes than entrust his all-star strategy sessions to the likes of Skype. He’s going to lead the entire investigative division one day, crowed Mrs. Furbert; every BRMS gumshoe in the world will answer to him, and the company will have to make him a Director. I’d like to make him knuckle sushi with jujitsu sauce.

  In corporate circles, everyone knows Martin (if not quite as well as he knows them). People treat him as they used to treat policemen once upon a time. When underneath their tall round helmets, they seemed to carry comprehensive knowledge of what ought to be done with the world at large. When their dress uniforms and shiny accoutrements reeked of integrity. This treatment has gone to Martin’s head. He always wears suits. His smile dares you to say something he can refute with a handy factoid plucked from his endless mental database, which is infallibly accurate and up-to-the-minute. He expects everyone to smile gratefully as he struts down the street, perhaps to do a little bow. That is, unless you’re secretly involved in some corporate transgression. In that case, his very presence would make you avert your eyes and attempt to scuttle out of range of his X-ray vision, which with a single glance bares the criminal’s darkest secrets to the adamantine light of justice.

  He has this annoying hand-pat he reserves for Nabi when they’re in public places. It means “Keep your mouth shut, dear, this is out of your league.” Everything heretofore described escapes her completely. But I mean, would I exaggerate?

  It’s true there are two Martins. One of them must be more fun than the other, but I really can’t tell which. Gumshoe-Martin? Pastor-Martin? I suppose, given the choice, I’d advise not getting him started on church. Then again, Mr. and Mrs. Furbert can’t not talk about church. The topic changes his whole face. His smile gets toothy and his eyes big and bright. He flings back his shoulders even more, if that’s possible, in nigh fanatical enthusiasm for bake sales, car boot sales, sermons, and Sunday Bible Study.

  Little Bermy’s got a hundred-plus churches in a twenty-square-mile space, the most churches per capita in the entire world; belonging to a church is part of being Bermudian. So when I happened to mention that though I was born and raised here, I was never baptized, Nabi almost fell off the jungle gym. Whatever, it’s the way things are, I get it. Must I also be subjected to such antics as the fig gag? This is in some restaurant: interrupting some astute remark of mine, Martin looks at his wife and says, “Figs.” Cautionary tone, twinkle in his eye. And the Furberts laugh themselves to kingdom come.

  To inquire would’ve been beneath me, not to mention useless. While they chortled fit to choke themselves to death, I got out my phone and searched Biblegateway.com. I was unable to tell if the hilarity issued from “He who tends a fig tree will eat its fruit and he who looks after his master will be honored” or the part where Jesus kills a fig tree because figs are out of season when the holy tummy rumbleth.

  Anyway, two Martins. Both tiresomely driven. But where his wife sees unflagging perseverance driven by faith in two-thousand-year-old promises, I see a guy who’s desperate to be liked and in charge. Lovable ambition. The mark of a shrewd capitalist.

  What Martin doesn’t know is—well, there’s a lot of things Martin doesn’t know, most of them pretty important. If I might indulge once more…

  I believe it was a Tuesday. A good day, I remember, belonging to the week of my catastrophic adventure. Nabi was at my place making kuro goma no mochi pan with black sesame seeds she’d brought in special from the States. Meanwhile I offered, for her exclusive listening pleasure, a dramatic reading from the NAID newsletter.

  “It’s never too early to consider end-of-life care for sensitive information, can I get an Amen? There comes a time, sistren and brethren, in the life of every factoid, notion, or question, even if it doth begatteth dogma, when people don’t want to know it anymore. Who cares what Kenji Okada-Caines ordered at Bertucci’s when there was still Bertucci’s in Harvard Square, when his payment by credit card was noted by Bertucci’s computer, which begatteth a bill which begatteth a receipt, which even as it was begot entered the terminal phase of its existence: the purgatory of irrelevancy, sistren and brethren! And I say unto you, yes I do sayeth unto thee and thine, that to be cross-shredded and diamond-shredded unto perfect particulation, which absolute scintillas begatteth none; I say for said bill and receipt this is no dissipation into an eternal night but into the eternal not that is salvation! But whatsoever becometh of the computer—the hard drive itself, children—that was once the very Jerusalem of the unremembered insignificant coincidence of a pizza and a hungry literature aficionado? Ask yourselves, sistren and brethren, I say now ask yourselves: is it time for a Panashred HDS5300 twenty-horsepower hard drive shredder with maximum torque and attached output conveyor to deliver mercy unto the unmerciful, gimme hallelujah!; lest the unremembered rise again, rise up!, and begatteth the gossip that—”

  “Bye, stop ya noize, ya idgit, check you makin me get the kuro goma in our tea. Gimme that thing, you, chooks.” Nabi laughing uncontrollably: the greatest thing in all the world. She snatched the newsletter and looked at it.

  She said, “The tactile-performative statement which is the art of information destruction needs to be examined from a critical point of view that takes all the clothing off whatever that stuff is people believe but don’t know they believe, as noted by that little bald man who shouldn’t have had to run away from Europe to make a nuisance of himself in Hollywood, where Minima Moralia was a box-office bomb.”

  Noisy playfight over NAID missive. Everything was hilarious after that. Tea was hilarious. “AccuWeather brought to you by the BF&M insurance group.” The unconscious sigh I breathed when getting into bed, which apparently I always breathed, cracked Nabi up for a good quarter-hour. And the importanc
e of this, of all of it, was acute enough to strike us keenly even then, even while we were too giddy to remark on it.

  We paid attention. We gave each other the priceless treasure of being able to laugh at ourselves.

  Now you know why I hate Fridays. And so imagine such a day. Clouds clogging the sky. Humidity off the charts. Nabiless evening ahead.

  I went out to St. George’s. Not a journey to be lightly undertaken. I had to drive across the country. Practically all of it. It took the better part of an hour. I had to take the Causeway and continue past the airport, that final eastern bastion of civilization. Nabi, raised in Somerset, would’ve said, Got your visa? Even the George in St. George’s, George Somers (Admiral Sir), only found it when his ship collided with it while he was looking for the Land of Milk and Honey. Faulty online maps and my straining memory warned that before I ran into the City of Saint George, I had to find a green wall that was nuzzling a blue one and make a hairpin left turn in between. With that, the road narrowed to a Warwick lizard’s gullet and morphed into a steep hill. The walls’ blaring colors and thick Bermuda stone closed in on my cringing convertible as it climbed. No room for sudden moves if I planned to keep my wing mirrors; so when a moped came zipping at me head-on, I slammed on the brakes and glared at the black-helmeted diddlybop. The brazen idgit strangled his brakes and glared at me.

  Many of our roads are lizard gullets. Standoffs aren’t uncommon. Because my car was so much nicer than this fool’s bush jitla, I conceded (just this once!) to the diddlybop. I turned into a driveway off my right-hand side, grumbling. This one was an ant gullet and just as bumpy. Wall on one side, hedges on the other. Gnarly-looking things, cherry bushes mixed with other species, brambles, sticks, and strangling vines just waiting to reach out and scratch my classic collectible. The bike went by behind me. I was about to back out onto the road when I saw the mailbox stuffed into the hedge.