Drafts of a Suicide Note

by Wong, Mandy-Suzanne

  I said all that to him. My Kenji. We were on the phone, I called him as soon as Martin called about the photo. Course I had to be home when Martin got there even though it was a Tuesday & I dreaded what would happen. I panicked, I let him have it (I mean Kenji). He had a lot to say as usual. He’s researched this Char Richards, she is “devious,” not to be trusted. All the same (he says), she’s not the one we need to worry about cuz clearly she sent the photo to his momma (!) & his momma sent the photo or told Char Richards to send it to Martin. “Clearly,” the man says though the trail points not to CAM but Clocktower.

  “Baby,” I said firmly, “you have got to get past this business with your momma & start taking responsibility.”

  I thought he’d start shouting. I’d been shouting (not like me at all), & he’d been that way lately (Lord, the lamp!). But he said in this exhausted voice, “Nabi, you don’t believe me?”

  Lord forgive me, but that did it. I thought he was trying to skirt the real issue by acting like an injured little lamb. I pointed out to him that this determination to make the whole world complicit in his hangups is just plain fullish but even more than that: “The real issue is you thinking there might be some danger, & instead of backing away from it to protect those you love, you plunge yourself on in. I try to say something, you act up & just ignore it.”

  Ya boy got the nerve to respond, sounding dismayed, even frightened, “Why the _____ are you acting like you think I’m out to get you? Why would I do that, Nabi?!”

  What am I supposed to say? He’s so wrapped up in his own version, the truth would clobber him if it ever got thru to him. Oh Lord, I froze. & Kenji took it like it was some kind of answer when it was really that I couldn’t answer! He said, “Nabi, I asked you to marry me.”

  & you know what I said? Nothing. You know what’s even more disgusting? When K said that, I felt like ripping my hair out. You know those awful things on TV where the lions rip up the zebra & all the camera guys just watch? I felt like the zebra. Suddenly all I could think about was how unfair life is for zebras. It made no sense, I should’ve said Kenji forgive me, but I couldn’t speak.

  It’s too late. I didn’t say a word. He’s the one who said, “I’m sorry, Nabi, really.”

  Then he said he wasn’t feeling well. He hung up quickly & I worried, but I couldn’t call him back.

  Fact is I’d moved on. Martin was on his way. Lord have mercy, I felt him breathing down my neck while he was still somewhere over the ocean. (“We will discuss this in person, Mrs Furbert!”) Last time we argued, M huffed & puffed like a headmaster trying to make me feel cheap. Well, Lord, I in’t cheap. I love Martin, I love Kenji, but I in’t no skank & that’s cuz of HOW we love. I tried to prepare. Make a list of responses in my head so I could whip them out & not have to think. They were all wrong. I forgot them.

  Martin crept into his own home like a burglar, & I should’ve got my You-know-what out of my chair, but all I could do was sit & look like I wasn’t tired. Tired like ridiculous, overplayed, like the bumper cars flew off in separate directions & left me on the ground doing the splits. I guess that does mean cheap. I can’t defend myself or promise anything. It’s too late, Honey. I can’t say that.

  Thought he’d fold his arms & say I really shouldn’t expect him to be surprised, something like that. He didn’t. Poor Martin dropped his suitcase & his briefcase on the floor, dropped his blazer, & looked shocked. Radar, polygraph instincts…shocked. His accusations just the other day, the invitation—my Martin’s got photographic recall, “no detail can escape”—yet somehow he just forgot? A stupid snapshot, somehow that’s undeniable? He said, “Who ARE you?”

  My husband. Yes, those very words, & his face like a pillowcase that’s been peeled off & thrown aside. I had no answer, no I had too many, I couldn’t say anything. Poor Martin left his bags on the floor, left his blazer, he went into his study & locked the door, & I didn’t see him again that night. I sat in the chair in the dark, & it was like the 2 of them slapped out everything between my ears except Luke 9:

  “Who do you say I am?”

  I didn’t go to my husband. I didn’t call Kenji. I went to my computer, but I had nothing to do there. Seabird, was it really me that made you?

  

  AS8.

  Linen-ish paper, inkjet printing slightly bleeding. Literary prose rhythms. Formal, old-fashioned (terribly alone), but serene. For everyone. A public allocution.

  Having found man’s life to be a wretchedly conceived scheme, I renounce it, and, to cause no further trouble…I am now about to enter on my normal condition. For people are almost always in their graves. When we survey the long race of men, it is strange and still more strange to find that they are mainly dead men, who have scarcely ever been otherwise.

  The suicide note of one of Hardy’s miserable, bumbling anti-villains. In this novel, Hardy’s debut, the suicide note functions as the penultimate chord in the last, harmonious cadence. Justice is served, remorse is suffered, intent to self-harm is unequivocally declared, and the surplus son and suitor gets himself out of the way so that happily ever after can proceed without any pesky moral nigglings. You can tell he’s reconciled to the outcome of his homemade noose and to the idea of a world sans him, which shan’t be in the least put out. If there’s any bitterness here, it’s half-hearted, even tongue-in-cheek. The happy bride and groom never mention him again, and it’s clear he wouldn’t expect them to.

  It’s almost too neat, isn’t it. Look closely and you’ll see it doesn’t even make much sense. Can a human be a human and have never lived? Can the still and empty grave have been this man’s normal condition if all his problems amounted to hunger, love, and fear? Isn’t this a string of specious excuses whose lofty tones cover up his pointless superfluity?

  By the time he wrote his last, completely hopeless novel, Hardy was done with cover-ups. The suicide of the surplus son resolves nothing, accomplishes nothing, paves the way for nothing but dissolution. So when the surplus suitor dies in turn, nobody notices, the lady beloved having run off to seek unhappiness. That’s how I read it, anyway: happily ever after is impossible, the lady beloved doesn’t even want it—because the surplus son refuses to pretend that his subtraction is any more lofty or less remarkable than it is, and so nobody’s off the hook, nobody, and remainders are guilty before the subtracted. His suicide note says, Done because we are too menny [sic.]. Whether he means “too many” or “two things that are not men but too alike to men,” he reduces himself to nothing more than surplus quantity, drubbing everybody else with the reality of their own insignificance. For anyone who’s insignificant to themselves, happiness is a cover-up. Hardy never wrote another novel after that.

  I’d never noticed any of this in Hardy’s books before. Why my memory should alight upon it now I’ve no idea.

  In twenty-four hours, three people swore to bring me down. Erik was innocuous, so when the last blow struck with such precision, I knew I’d been hit with some poisoned synthesis of other evil powers. But what’s a puny ghost against a dragon and a hunter? I’d become one of the ukabarenairei, a tired ghost who hangs around the living out of dissatisfaction with its own expired life. It can’t actually do anything. This kind of ghost lacks the vivid energy of ikiryou and the vengeful drive of onryou, so its movements aren’t directed. It’s just a yuurei, literally “dim spirit.” It’s a faint sense of a vague, annoying lack that you wouldn’t even notice if not for its listless self-assertions now and then. It’s a boring ghost, a pointless ghost. A ghost nobody wants, which no one has time for. One of those things that should not have bothered thinking itself up.

  Suicide is the freedom to negate an inauthentic situation and not be suckered into another one. It’s freedom that is free from being freedom to do anything. Freedom as negation is the negation of freedom: it just means there’s no pressure anymore. Of course no one can experience this kind of freedom; once you’r
e dead, you can’t experience at all, and that’s the point. Freedom from pain, freedom from relief, from dread and the worst of them all: hope.

  That’s one reason I love Aetna just the way she is. Dead and absent, bleeding out of the world, away from prying eyes, dated wounds, isolation, and desire. AS8 cries out to the Hardy fan in me (alone, terribly alone…everywhere and always). Structurally it’s First Form: there’s the long struggle with an unbearable problem; the sense that the problem isn’t just her fault, yet only with her death can anyone escape it; she asks forgiveness, begs indulgence of her readers (textbook example); and she takes care, with poetic imagery that’s all her own, to let readers know that she is rational and competent. You don’t need to understand, she says, only trust that I know what I’m doing. Others might feel differently, but to this reader her intentions are unambiguous, especially as compared to the mercurial sentiments in AS1-7.

  The sense that AS8 is an appeal to a wide audience may pose difficulties for those who cannot help but question its suicidal authenticity. But to me there’s no doubt. Even if Aetna composed this for Clocktower and the classic structure is but proof of her refined skill, it’s clear that the end of her road is firmly before her eyes. AS8 tolls with finality.

  My memories of that awful night are incoherent. You can guess what happened. Just look at the photo and where it ended up. Nabi blamed me, never considering the fact that only one thing could turn that picture into a disgrace. It doesn’t deserve to be contemptible. Still, I can’t blame her for thinking otherwise, considering what I am. Our argument was bitter, rage and panic shooting between us like ice-tipped lances. Such savage desperation had never entered our quarrels. We sounded nothing like ourselves; I said all the wrong things, but Nabi was cruel. Cruel. Her wrath cast everything in new, terrible shades that lurched grotesquely between tones, shifted this way and that in the noxious winds of doubt, subverting all perspectives and undermining everything I thought I knew. At the time it felt like the mutation happened suddenly. Like the swift dismemberment of a foot causing the world to tilt. But then it kept on happening: things I’d known, basic things, inverting, growing tentacles or monstrous heads, or vanishing until, dismayed to the point of panic, I really had to wonder about my sanity.

  The night of the argument, something like three in the morning. My muscles were like Jell-O. Thoughts of movement made me dizzy. The air seemed very still, and that was fine, even awesome. But I was cold, my skin was clammy, and when I pulled up the covers, there weren’t any. An idea dawned, unwelcome. I was in a bookstore, lying on the floor. The store was closed, and if I could get my eyes to open all the shelves would be black, tall and crowded like a sold-out gallery. The books would be big and small and thick and thin, each with two red bookmarks and a black cover. And underneath each cover there would be another cover. And another and another, each one black and empty. I hallucinated a giant wakizashi swooping at me with a roar. The sword was gray and sharp and smelled Sea-water green. So I went to sleep. I didn’t want to wake up. But I felt like I had to in case Nabi called me back.

  She didn’t. I waited and waited and got so fucking despondent. I could only think of one person to call.

  “You said you were gonna call me,” I mewled.

  “Something came up. Figured you’d call sooner or later.”

  “Char, the picture.”

  “Well.” She was demure.

  Why did I call? Char made an offering of me and Nabi to the dragon. Masami knew Nabi would fly to Martin with her conscience firing her rockets. I imagined a gift basket, champagne, crisp CAM letterhead: Dear Mr. Furbert, Break my son the traitor.

  “You there, Kenji?” Curious, not concerned.

  “I don’t know.”

  “How much did you take?”

  “Some.”

  “Does it sound like you’re snoring when you breathe?”

  She was placid. I was so messed up. I think I just said, “Char.”

  “You should throw up.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Seriously. I’m from Brooklyn, I know about this stuff.”

  “Char.”

  She sighed. “I’ll come over.”

  “No, don’t come.” I wanted her to come.

  “Then talk,” she said. Like it was a simple thing. “Stay awake.” She paused and asked, “Where is she?”

  I remember my voice sounded out of reach and thin. It came out slowly like air from a pinprick in a tire. I think I was on the couch, blinking now and then at a black ceiling. I said, “She suddenly thought one afternoon, when looking in the glass at her fairness, that there was yet another date, of greater importance to her than those; that of her own death, when all these charms would have disappeared; a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there.”

  “Kenji.”

  “It’s Thomas Hardy. Did you know he was totally misunderstood? He gave up writing novels in despair.”

  “Go and throw up, Kenji. I’ll hold.”

  “No, I don’t want to. You want to talk, you tell me why.”

  A puzzled silence or an exasperated one. I lay there panting and demoralized.

  “Did Myrtle Trimm help you?”

  “No. People’s mommas never help me.”

  “I helped you.”

  “That’s what you think.”

  “You have to stay awake, Kenji.”

  “Char, you have a weird variety of skills.”

  “You learn stuff because you have to. You know how it is.”

  And we waited. I was too out of it for flirting. I had no agenda. But as I strained to keep up whatever I was doing and Char strained her enviable patience, there came a silent moment when isolation took us by our throats.

  “Why’d it have to be you, Char? Why do you and I have to have the same fucking infection?”

  She replied, “I’ve been wondering about the reason you did this. What’s it going to take, Kenji?”

  “Aetna’s dead, Char, really. I wish it wasn’t true, I wish she’d waited.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Indifferent as her namesake, a noncommittal singe.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You love her.” Like she’d read it in a manual.

  “Yes.”

  “She trusts you. You’re determined. I get it. You like to make things happen indirectly. I respect that. That’s why I spent so much time with you, not to say it wasn’t an experience.”

  Press pause on this peaceful interaction. I’d encourage you to reread Char’s last statement. Of course I’m an experience, I know that, not that part. I mean the part where she lets slip that everything she did had but a single purpose. To test me, probe me, drive me to distraction, hoping I’d thoughtlessly reveal what she was so determined to believe I knew.

  “We’re the same, Kenji, but we’re not equal. You’re at the end of your rope.”

  No arguments.

  “I don’t want to do this,” she said, quiet as a gas that seeps beneath a door, “but if you don’t tell me where she is and how you helped her disappear, Clocktower will negotiate a contract with BRMS. We’ll ask them to investigate Bull’s Head Shreds. Publicly.”

  “Why? What for?”

  “I don’t know,” said Char. Like this was a minor point and uninteresting at that. “Breach of confidentiality, whatever, I’ll think of something.”

  “But we’ve never worked for you. We can’t breach anything.”

  “So what? Once the rumor’s out, it’s out. Everybody knows you, right?”

  Any other day, I’d have thrown back a whole arsenal of counter-threats. Maybe I did, but if I did I can’t remember and they were ineffective.

  “Proof means little in the end. In a place like this, suspicion is e
nough. And sensitive stuff like document security? Forget it. Once people start to wonder if they can really trust you, they won’t take the chance. I have that on good authority. So even if the investigation never happened, the rumor that it might happen would ruin you. And her.”

  She said it so simply. Unblemished by resentment, impatience, or evil. However, there was this And her. This And her tossed out offhandedly: her was a pointed reference to Nabi—my Nabi, like a Taser to the throat—and so I made up my mind. In a single, mighty heave, I propelled myself into alertness, flung the tatters of my intellectual prowess at whatever the hell just happened and what the fuck was I supposed to do next, and hurled my strength into my flaccid muscles, springing from the couch and bursting free of lethargy. I tried anyway. Wasn’t too successful.

  More words might’ve been exchanged, I couldn’t say. When I got myself upright, I got dizzy, dropped the phone, and so ended our negotiation. Really. That’s what happened. I hope Char will always think I hung up on her in defiance.

  The little bull with scimitars for horns. Scrabbling with slipping hooves at the narrow summit of a small iceberg. Surrounded by killer whales.

  Because of ten suicide notes and a “gotta-do-it” feeling.

  I lay under the weight of that awful truth, unable to find a decent breath. Then I stuck my fingers down my throat.

  Back on the phone. No plan, just a cry thrown into the dark and the elimination of every other option.

  He wasn’t answering. It was barely after five, but I would’ve been awake if I were him. I cleaned myself up and drove to his office. Seon Place on Front Street. They’ve got two floors to themselves. The place was locked, the garage barred. It was too early. I leaned against my car in the shadow of the edifice’s glass-fronted wings, which protrude symmetrically like the lenses on giant binoculars. Meanwhile a new dawn stole over the roofs of the reinsurance companies across the street. I was lightheaded and jittery. I recall the feeling that the morning was something I’d have to carry on my shoulders. Wasn’t sure I was up to it.