Drafts of a Suicide Note

by Wong, Mandy-Suzanne

  “What? What’d I do? Or not do? I mean, Martin’s in the perfect place—”

  “Kenji.” Like a groan.

  “Well, look, not even Masami would question him. Char sure as hell couldn’t; and once he gets more evidence, with what I already know, we could—”

  “Kenji, you don’t know anything!”

  Her voice in that moment. Left a scar on my memory like a third-degree burn.

  “None of what you think you know is evidence, Kenji. It wouldn’t count for nothing in an official inquiry. I’ve been trying to tell you nicely, but bye you just don’t listen! You put us through all this because of something that you guessed. You guessed, based on literary carrying on, and that is not hard evidence, Kenji. It wouldn’t count.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, for starters, you couldn’t even prove Aetna Simmons ever existed! You couldn’t find her passport, birth certificate, driver’s license. Don’t deny it, you said it in your essay.”

  I felt like a whoopee cushion that’s been sat on.

  “That bank account you found probably isn’t even real. I mean, whoever you talked to was just telling you what you want to hear to get you off their back. And now, like sending my life up in smoke wasn’t enough, now you want to send Martin’s company after this? I mean, you want me to let him think it would somehow be helpful if he went chasing after, I don’t know, a mirage?”

  The great stomach of spacetime convulsed and overturned. Whooshing in my head as the bench, the soil beneath, Nabi’s faith in me, everything turned over and dumped me out. Of course Nabi was wrong: I had the Ten, all my research, Masami and Char and what they’d done, it all fit together. Yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that all of it was raining down around me into the abyss. The debris of surmises, shadows, tones, omissions, ten suicide notes, and besides that nothing but a too-familiar emptiness. My voice seemed far away, a forlorn cry left behind to haunt the world above as the rest of me kept falling.

  “She was real,” I said. “I bet Char even knew her.”

  “That woman who took our picture?”

  “She thinks Aetna’s still alive. She told me. That’s why she sent the photo. She thinks I know where Aetna’s hiding and that I’m just holding out on her. She’s crazy but she’s smart, Nabi. And she’s got resources. Or, I mean, I think she does. She acts like she does, sort of. I mean, she must. Obviously Clocktower and CAM are on her side. That’s why we need Martin.”

  The way Nabi looked at me, I don’t think she saw me, but whatever it was she saw—something from the past or the future, I don’t know, I’ve tried and tried to figure out what it might be, why she did what she did, why such a morbid thing would ever occur to Nabi, the light of the whole world. That horrified look and she turned away, her hand over her mouth.

  “Nabi, what is it?” I took her gently by the shoulders. She began to cry. I said, “What’s happened? What have I done? Oh god, Nabi.” She shook her head, shrugged away my hands, and next thing I knew, I was on my knees: “Nabi, tell me, you’re killing me!”

  “Lord have mercy!” she breathed, taking my face in her hands. “I don’t know what to do.”

  My breath went out in a rush of hysteria, which in my perspicacity I mistook for relief. I gathered Nabi close and said, “We’ll run.”

  She wriggled away with a growl. It bowled me onto my behind. Her reply almost convinced me that my heart had stopped.

  “Kenji, what’d I just say about you and self-absorption?”

  Feeling like a crumb vanishing into a dustbin, I said something such as: “But—”

  At first she had no comment, intent on that time-telescope she wouldn’t let me see. I moved, perhaps to brain myself against a tree, and the movement seemed to bring her back to where we were. She reached out to me, and I, glutton for punishment, put my cheek in her lap. She whispered a prayer, something like “little bee.”

  “I need you to trust me, baby. This won’t make sense to you yet. Maybe it never will. Bear with me anyway, all right? I mean because you love me. And no questions yet, okay? I need you to tell me something.”

  But see, I was at my lowest. Well, maybe not, since the worst was yet to come. Anyway, I was beyond distraught. “What do you mean no questions? Of course I’ve got questions, I don’t even know what we’re talking about, where are you going with—”

  “Kenji,” she said firmly, “how far do you think Char Richards would go? Your momma too, if you were right about all this?”

  “But I don’t understand, I just told you Char said she’d get BRMS—”

  “But would she do more than that? Would she do worse than that? That’s what I’m asking.”

  Nabi gripped my hands. Her gorgeous brown eyes were full of frightened tears.

  “Now take a deep breath, baby. Think. And give me your best guess. You’re more equipped for it than anyone I know.”

  I was caught in the middle of a meteor shower, tumbling and being tumbled on at the same time. I couldn’t think except about one thing, the same thing: Nabi, come back. All I could do was fumble for what to say to make it happen, panicking because I had no idea what she wanted. Hadn’t she said the night before that nothing could be worse than disgrace?

  “Nabi, I don’t know.”

  “Think, Kenji!” Squeezing my hands like her life depended on it.

  “I guess they’d go as far as it’s possible to go.”

  “Hurting people?”

  “Maybe, yeah, they could.”

  “Both of them?”

  “Probably.”

  “You talked to her? Char Richards? Not just researched?”

  What could I do except nod? Nabi let go of my hands.

  “Nabi, talk to me.”

  She ignored me for the telescope. And the longer she looked, the more her face rigidified into a darker countenance that seemed less and less familiar. When she spoke, she was angry, and I wondered if an evil ghost had plucked me from my world and stuck me in a cosmic spin cycle.

  She said, “What would they do if they found Aetna Simmons? To us and to her?”

  “Nobody can do anything to her.”

  “You sure about that? What’re you going to tell Char Richards?”

  “I’ve been telling her the truth. Aetna’s dead. There’s evidence ten times over.”

  “Evidence? Kenji, for once in your life think outside the box you’ve made out of your own head. What if you’re wrong?”

  “I’m not wrong. She was real, and then she died. We knew that from the beginning.”

  “Knew it how? ’Cause you read it on the Internet? In a local news source that you’ve pooh-poohed all your life?”

  “No, no, Nabi, you don’t get it. See, there’s real evidence. Written evidence. I may not know about much else, but I know about writing. Words and ideas. Aetna’s words. Ten suicide notes.”

  “And you believe everything you read?” said Nabi softly. “Think about it, baby. First, despite a total lack of evidence, you decide this woman faked suicide notes for a living, including the ones you found. Then you turn around and say when it came to her own death, she couldn’t help but tell the truth.”

  “That’s what paradox means. It’s a vital contradiction. Look, I know Aetna, okay? I know her as only the closest, most faithful and sympathetic reader can know an author: better than she knew herself. She couldn’t lie to me even if she wanted to, and she doesn’t have to! That’s what I’ve done for her. She escaped those people, the ultimate sacrifice for the ultimate freedom, and I’m the only one who understands—”

  “Yeah, and what if she didn’t? What would they do? What would you do, Kenji?”

  “It’s a moot point!”

  “What if you’re wrong? What if she’s out there all alone, no one to help her? What if she’s just a nice, ordinary person, not some kind of evil maste
rmind but just one of God’s children trying to get by? What could she do?”

  “Why the hell are you taking this so personally? You want to talk about what-ifs? What if everything I say and do wasn’t a personal affront to you? What if years of literary training were actual experiences that actually counted for something? What if I stood a chance of knowing what the hell I’m talking about?”

  “Watch your mouth, Kenji Okada-Caines! This is your fault in the first place for letting that Clocktower woman think you know something. What if you really dropped some kind of hint and didn’t know it? What if she found what you didn’t want to see even though it was right there under your nose?”

  Standing now and hissing at each other. Neither of us considered what might happen if the wrong person had followed us or a jogger happened to pass through our little copse and the jogger’s husband’s stepsister happened to work for CAM. I had no handle on the conversation, I’d given up trying to get one, I was at the end of my tether. As despair overpowered me, it became clear that only one person had a shred of sense.

  “Aetna made sure no one could touch her.”

  “That’s what you think, but what if she didn’t? Kenji, what if—what if maybe you were right about everything except one thing: just the idea that she’s, well, no longer around? I’m just saying what if, but Lord have mercy—Kenji, what if Aetna was alive and you knew where she was?”

  Nabi fixed me with a beseeching look. My fortitude was gone, my discernment irreparably diseased. How much was true, how much did Nabi truly believe, how much was just hypothesis? I don’t know, I still don’t know. I shook my head but Nabi gripped my arms as though she planned to shake me if she didn’t get her answer. In a ruined voice I said, “I’d call Char and tell her. Is that what you want me to say?”

  “But why?”

  “For you, Nabi. For you. For Bull’s Head Shreds, your life’s work.”

  “Kenji, promise me you won’t.”

  “What?”

  “I mean it.”

  “Am I going crazy? What the—Look, Nabi. No, all right? No. No, you don’t mean it, and no, I won’t promise, not even hypothetically even though I—”

  “Please, baby.”

  “I said no. If you’re trying to make me choose between you and Aetna—like if I said I’d rescue her, it’d give you an excuse to pretend I somehow love you less and you could go running back to Martin with a clear conscience—well, I won’t do it, Nabi. I’d choose you. Even though I don’t deserve it and you wouldn’t—you’ll never choose me. Even if she was your sister, it wouldn’t matter.”

  “Yeah, well, what if it was me? What if I’m Aetna Simmons? It was me the whole time, that’s right! Because I got sick and tired of the two of you—both of you fools thinking you’re all that. Oh, Nabilah’s just a worker bee, just confetti and a Bible Study partner for team leader. And guess what! You’re no better! Swaggering around the place like just because you got to go away, you’re the only one who knows how to line up words and make them do something. Not a thought to call her own in her pretty little brain, right? Well, got your chocolates, innit, both of you! What you gonna do about it?”

  I sank onto the bench. Nabi burst into tears.

  Nabi dead and bloated at the bottom of the sea. Nabi dressed for damnation, vomiting a storm. A gun in Nabi’s mouth as cars fly past her in a desert summoned from a second-hand card table. Daily, my nikkou, cultivating despair.

  Impossible. In her, it was valiant. But in you, Nabi, no, it’s wrong, and just the thought of it is like inhaling death. That’s why I couldn’t move at first when you turned and ran. The air in me went still, heavy and fetid. And when like someone drowning I kicked towards the sun, you were halfway across the lawn. When I screamed, you shouted back, “Don’t follow me Kenji I mean it!” but I kept running, and when I got to the parking lot you were already gone peeling off in the truck and I had to sit down I sat where one of your tires left a mark on the asphalt and Nabi I wept so help me I wept.

  

  AS9.

  White copy bond, black ink, laser, huge font. Only note with addressee. Clumsy trimeter. 2 instructions: to-do list or warning? Czarina???

  Up became down. The proximal were unreasonably far away. The dead came to life and life succumbed to death. Ghosts took on solid form while the tangible world grew shadowy and insubstantial. Strangers seemed to know me best while the great love of my life became alien.

  Haven’t seen her since she ran from me and I collapsed in a parking lot. Haven’t heard from her either, not for lack of trying.

  It might interest you to know that the woman with the perambulator saved me from being run over that day, much good did it do anyone. This being Bermuda, she and two other young mothers, also with perambulators, surrounded me and insisted on helping me back to my car. They petted me and said there there sweetiepie, can’t be as bad as all that. They refrained from asking me my name. When attempting to persuade myself that none of this was happening induced hyperventilation, one of the moms whipped out a paper bag, another started praying, and the third invited me home. I said thank you very much but, humiliated enough for one day, I turned her down.

  Instead I managed to extract myself politely and crawl back to my empty flat. I took enough Zohytin to knock out a polar bear. I haven’t been myself since. I’ve been sick a lot. Mixing Zo with rum to make it last doesn’t work. Dreaming of blackness and seppuku. Asking why Nabi would want anything to do with Siamese cats, thinking if I could just understand that one thing, I’d know what to say to persuade her to answer me.

  It hasn’t worked yet. The fuzzy trimeter in AS9 doesn’t help. Poetry isn’t her thing, especially bad poetry. For content, AS9 has just a smattering of ambiguous well-wishes for the old harpy’s future. It is true Nabi wishes everybody well, but she does so unencumbered by ambiguity.

  In the heady first days of my discovery, when Aetna’s texts danced with my intellect to the irresistible strains of my literary training, I saw in AS9 the strongest proponent of the Aesthetic Hypothesis; for there is no service that this note could have done Clocktower. Yet there it is: tying up loose ends, I thought, the last of the drama’s rising action which will crest at what is now inexorable. Once I knew something of Myrtle, I saw that AS9 is also a vague and empty threat doubling as a helpless good-riddance.

  But then Nabi. Then with everything I am, I rebelled against my own thinking. Nabi doesn’t jibe, Nabi doesn’t threaten, Nabi wouldn’t ever…

  So I got high and from that perspective discovered that AS9, with its wounded-adolescent style, contained coded instructions for a diagram that would make everything clear. A six-whiskered Siamese cat (six lines in AS9, take note) with one whisker outlined in the letters of Myrtle’s name and another, opposite, in those of Czarina’s. The eyes, nose, and ears consist of other initials such as A, C, M, and P. Clearly a capital N would have no place in such a configuration, which thereby proves once and for all that Nabi is just Nabi.

  I was calm. It all made sense. And though my Siamese Hello Kitty resembled nothing so much as an uprooted potato, I congratulated myself on rising above the crisis methodically and philosophically. Until I wasn’t high anymore. And the truth struck me so hard I couldn’t get back up. Luckily I had my pills under my pillow.

  I don’t actually know Nabi. Nabi is Aetna Simmons? No. She wouldn’t. Would she? She wouldn’t have let me do all this—but Char said You love her, and I said Yes. Then who? Who was that in my arms? Who haunted my dreams after I traded her for Harvard? Who was that who said, under the trees which were our Neverland, Why should we put an end to all that’s sweet and lovely?

  Maybe that’s not what she said. Maybe it wasn’t what she meant either. I don’t even know who I’m thinking about. And seven days without her. I’m really not very well.

  After she left me. Two days in my flat thinking she’d call. She didn’t.

/>   I called Bull’s Head Shreds. Wayneesha answered. She asked if I knew when Mrs. Furbert would be coming in.

  Nabi never takes a day without informing all concerned and making sure everything’s covered. Straining for nonchalance that eluded me completely, I expressed confidence that Mrs. Furbert would be there any minute. I asked Wayneesha to have Nabi call me when she arrived. “While you’re at it, call me yourself, please, if you don’t mind. In case she gets busy.” Or refused to give me the time of day.

  Nabi never called. Wayneesha didn’t either. I called back the next day, Friday: Nabi hadn’t been to work in two days. That evening I tried Iesha. She hadn’t heard from Nabi in some time besides in church. Their parents hadn’t either, but in Nabi’s busy life this was not unusual. Martin didn’t answer and didn’t call me back. I called the pastor at Mount Olive, pretending I thought I’d find Nabi at choir practice. The pastor hadn’t seen her in over a week.

  I debated about Char. If it hadn’t occurred to her to associate Aetna with Nabi, far be it from me to dispel her ignorance. But what if when the one who claimed to love her promised to betray her, Nabi thought her only hope was to throw herself on Char’s mercy?

  Images of Char. Black leather, studded whip, maybe a garrote. She was strong enough to beat someone to death. She’d been known to play with Narcan. Like she had any right to decide someone else’s fate. Wracked by indecision, I left her a deranged voicemail. She didn’t call back.

  Beginning to wonder if I was the lone survivor of an apocalyptic cataclysm. Or if I was the one who’d left the world for its ghostly parody.

  The following day I considered the police. Countless reasons why that would’ve been a bad idea. I reviewed all my research in the faulty light of new questions. Was she? Wasn’t she? Until I couldn’t see her face and was unable to discern any rational excuse to answer yes to either. No and no. That’s it. Maybe I’m crazy.