It was a relief when Char called. The vacuum of that office was smothering.
I said, “I’ll tell you everything.”
No surprise to Char. She made no remark, just gave a room number at the Rosedon. Pitts Bay Road atop a hill. A converted English manor at the summit of a sweeping drive, like a kanzashi ornament secured with a silk ribbon. Flower-patterned curtains and velveteen chairs arranged before a painting of an English countryside gave a cozy atmosphere to the lobby’s dramatic architectural curves. Char met me there and said, “You look rotten.”
She, on the other hand, wore a filmy cover-up over a string bikini. She looked so good it was maddening and I wanted to hit something. She led me upstairs to a spacious corner suite with its own balcony, half arts-and-crafts, half colonial-plantation style. I imagined her kicking off her shoes in this pristine place after a long ride in a rented Twizy from a messy house, where for my benefit she’d doused herself in a dead woman’s dust. She locked the door behind us, and like a spurned prostitute I said, “Why didn’t you return my calls?”
She smiled like an anaconda who’s found that perfect no-slip grip. “Don’t worry, we’re still friends.”
“Did something happen?”
“No. I just wanted you to know what it feels like.”
This with her hands all over me. The warm lamplight of this borrowed room. The burn of betrayal, fucking loneliness, frustration as the main force in a life lived in a chintzy little bowl stored on a shelf out of the way, and I was at Rosedon to beg. I seized her by the arms. Too hard, she even gasped, but she slid her tongue into my mouth like someone sneaking a petit four from someone else’s tray. And I was deplorable, I let the woman tease me, even open my shirt, only for her to throw me in a wingback chair and walk away, leaving me panting like a dog with my face in my hands.
She returned with coffee. Took the wingback across from me and waited.
“I have questions too, you know.”
“I’ll do what I can.”
“Not good enough. You wouldn’t give anything for free. Why should I?”
“Because I blackmailed you?”
“You keep it up and I’ll have nothing else to lose.”
This interaction was full of long looks. It drove me crazy; I wanted to grab my phone, pull up the photo Char had taken, shove it in her face and shriek, Who is she and what have you done?! Perfect way to get nowhere. Char was wary and curious, I was desperate and looked like a clown, and we knew full well we were both liars.
“All right,” said Char. “Quid pro quo and all that.”
She bade me start at the beginning.
“At least four years ago…it was your brainchild, I think. But it took at least two of you. And Aetna. Maybe someone at CAM. It might’ve started with Macy Moran.”
I mentioned CAM on the off-chance that it might make me appear sympathetic to Char and her cohorts. She wasn’t the type to let things slip, but still I had to hope. She was the first and only person not to exclaim in disbelief at the notion of fake suicide notes.
Her eyelids didn’t even twitch.
“It’s about doing your job,” I said. “Eliminating needless expense is what risk management means.” Like I’d practically written the book on the subject.
Unimpressed, Char said, “Where’d you meet her?”
“Bernews article.”
“Excuse me?”
“Where’d you think she went? I mean when she disappeared.”
“Took her money and took off.”
“You haven’t found her yet, have you?” Taunting not pleading. I hope.
Well, we’re here, aren’t we? said Char’s eloquent eyebrows.
I watched Nabi flee across the lawn. The image still hits hard. Wooziness gripped me and I said, “Why? She just up and left. Why?”
“What’s this about an essay?”
“You’re not gonna like this.”
I didn’t mention names. I was vague about my sources. But Char got the gist of everything from Bernews to the Ten to the police file, landlady-extortionist, and Aetna Simmons’ Final Words… As I talked, Char’s eyelids answered, lifting or flickering, much to my surprise, in expressions of growing interest. Her verbal contribution consisted of the following remarks:
— “So you never even met her.”
— “No, it did not occur to me to stick my fingers in a dead cat’s throat.”
— “Photos. Where do you think? A whole box labeled Czarina.”
And finally: “Something is very wrong with you.”
I said, “The real Aetna, the one who lived and died, she understood that identity’s all just words. And she lived that understanding. And that’s what she sold you. Her ability to not be anyone. And that mutability, that refusal to keep still, that’s what she really was.”
I’d thought Char would be a pacer. Big-boss types often are. But she sat in the chair, mug in hand, dubious frown. Watching me.
“Being and not being is hard,” I blundered.
“Or,” said Char, “you got carried away. Teddy bear, you’re perceptive when you want to be. But you’re also just another empty male trying to puff yourself up with visions of a helpless girl who can’t do anything on her own behalf to prove you wrong.”
Swift kick that left me winded. Char spoke of Aetna and me with equal repugnance. I said, “But it’s not like that, it’s—”
It probably was sort of like that. In that sense too I failed her. Aetna, I mean. Reading’s always like that, isn’t it? A little? But Aetna was never—Nabi, no, never—never just a mirror, some receptacle for my idiotic feelings.
“Char, I mean—she was helpless because of what she let you do with her. But she wasn’t just some thing I found lying around—like some Sleeping Beauty napping in the casket in some episode of Cold Case. No. Aetna’s words—every one of them was something she chose and arranged. All I did was read, read hard enough to find that truth, Aetna Simmons’ living truth, a living contradiction. Why? Because I admired what she’d done, she alone, Aetna—not ’cause I’m fucked up, I know I’m fucked up—but because of what she did. For Christ’s sake, Char, she isn’t even here—at least, I don’t think—and she’s making me question everything, making me—”
“You got issues,” said Char.
“You have no idea,” said I.
Char looked at the ceiling. Her exasperated head-shake aimed at male-kind in general. “How’d she wind up with a W-2? It’s up to employers to generate those and file them.”
This I had not known. “You didn’t file it?”
“That would’ve been stupid.”
We tossed around ideas. I supposed Aetna faked the thing, an eloquent prop in the theater of the Ten. A subtle way of signing her name and Clocktower’s to her death warrant.
“Why bother with subtlety? The point was to expose the whole thing and then die. She had no reason to hide anymore,” said Char.
Subtle for subtle’s sake. For art’s sake. Not long ago, I would’ve declaimed it with conviction. But new, afflictive doubts—was she or wasn’t she?—made it impossible. I struggled to focus and not to appear stricken; for although I had no answer, Char’s question in itself was a triumph. It meant that she believed me, believed Aetna was dead, which meant maybe Nabi was safe. But Char was amemasu, a shapeshifter wrapped in fog, water, and night. I could not anticipate her, couldn’t even ascertain her perspective. Why, for example, was she so interested in a doomed piece of literary criticism?
More than my knowledge of the scheme, more than Aetna Simmons, that scholarly buffoonery caught Char’s attention and held fast.
Aetna Simmons’ Final Words: Suicide and Suicide Notes as Works of Art.
“That thing you wrote. Send it to my phone.”
Char had me take her through it twice. All of it.
As I expounde
d on the significance of to-do lists, she said, “This was a lot of work. What made you want to do all this?”
What makes a candle burn up its own flesh?
I’m not sure I really said that. Maybe I only thought it. I remember the question in what alternately seems to be Nabi’s voice and that of the wakizashi, the swish of sword through air.
“I’ve never read anything like this,” said Char.
“These days, the academic perspective—”
“It’s not academic. Man, you fell for her hook, line, and sinker.”
More head-shaking. Then a moment of stilling. Steeling herself as if to look at a dead body, Char looked at her phone, at my intellectual blood-spatter.
“You love her. That’s why you’ve taken her apart. Through her words. You dissected her.”
I’d never thought of it that way. To do so and think of Nabi was no good for me at all. I said weakly, “Was it Aetna Pauline?”
But Char was somewhere else. The phone lolled in her hand, the screen shone at her empty palm. Her faraway look had deadness in it. Also a haunted bitterness so hard and fixed, so arid that in feeding upon itself, sometime long ago it had burst into flame. Since whenever it was, the moment of ignition, she’d never let it die. And most of the time she believed she controlled it, but the reality was she couldn’t make herself stop feeding it. And maybe the moment of ignition had to do with differences between people, but it had more to do with love. The kind that hurts. Not slam-against-the-dresser hurt but hurt that keeps on digging at itself, taking me apart from the inside over and over. Char the impostor, who stole from widows and orphans, sat in thrall to the ghost of some such exquisite dissection, straight-backed and grimacing, not even half a minute. But I saw it.
It didn’t shock me like it should’ve. Probably because I live with it all the time. Or she faked it to torture me. Or I made it up, driving myself batty with Where are you, how could you leave me here alone… Char’s phone was right side up again already, her deep breath over and done with or imaginary.
She said, “Explain the narrative again. Want to make sure I get this.”
She meant the Ten, the essay. Aetna’s death throes clanging against my dismembered insides.
Ten suicide notes. Each one sealed and yet reverberant in the next and the last.
“The last. AS10. Well, this is, you know: wow, this is it. Perfection in the form of an unbreakable commitment. The others are full of masks. Images, tones, structures. In AS10, she strips all that away, the words run out of steam. Only bare thoughts left. Unvarnished, you know? And current. Forward-looking. That’s how we know she was a young person. Old people kill themselves when they can’t endure the weight of the past but can’t escape it either. Aetna was different. She did it for the sake of the future, not the past. For death as absence and silence, everlasting incompleteness. That’s what the dashes mean. Incomplete thoughts, things that want doing but—you know. She looks ahead into nothing—”
I never told Char what I left out of the essay. Not on purpose, I just didn’t realize. Not until that night. After a day behind Nabi’s desk proved to be as enigmatic as an ancient Bavarian grimoire, and I don’t even know if the ancient Bavarians had grimoires. She wasn’t, but what if she was? My stupid essay overlooked the futility of hope. I was so intent on narrative and resolution, making things make sense—oh god, I misread. I misread AS10’s final wishes as imperatives. Misunderstood. It’s not a to-do list.
It’s a jumble of empty aspirations. Things Aetna must’ve known nobody could achieve except in dreams. Clichéd “instructions for life” like the sentiments of postcards. Such pointless things are analogies of existence.
The author of AS10 didn’t necessarily want to die. She could’ve survived.
This occurred to me at Rosedon in the middle of a sentence. I didn’t mention it to Char, having insisted all the time on the opposite. With a shudder of nausea, the best I could think to do was continue on that course: insist for Nabi’s sake that Aetna Simmons left the living world long ago.
“You all right?”
“Lost my train of thought. AS10, looking into nothing. She welcomes it, the nothing, and she knows that means she’s ready. For real this time, the end. She walks into the sea or heads for that gun shop in the desert. She’s gone, Char. Texts always betray themselves. And the real truth is I’m sorry but I wasted your time and that’s everything I have to say, I don’t know any more, I’m a hack, Char, that’s all. I’m no threat to you or anyone.” I wanted to go, but I thought I’d sway if I stood up.
Char paged through what I’d written. Frowning as if, having let it take her unawares and even get a jab in, she was determined to subdue it this time around. She dared it to defy her. As though what I had written were actually capable of something. I almost felt like laughing, watching her pore over it. Then I thought of how much I’d got wrong and felt like drowning.
“Char, when was the last time you saw her?”
“I’ve never seen her. We’d communicate online.”
“You really hired her online?”
Char gave me a glance that said I should’ve known better than to wonder about the obvious and inconsequential. She turned back to my essay and said, “Insurance association seeks innovative freelance copywriter for unique project in interesting locale. Details to be discussed with candidate. You have any idea how many writers are out there waiting for someone to say, Yes, and you’re just what I need? Nobody asked what the project was, just assured us they were perfect for it. She was convenient, she passed the background check, and she was just desperate enough. That’s all.”
It was all I could do not to dissolve, and I couldn’t let it show. I recall hanging onto the armrests of the chair, trying to absorb its solidity into my voice, to mime Char’s stoicism with the tired muscles in my face.
“And Char, what if—pretend she’s alive. What would you have done if she’d betrayed you and gone off like you thought, but then you found her?”
She looked at me. The red eyes of a panther in a midnight wood. “If it wasn’t for you, no one would’ve known what she was doing.”
“Just say what if.”
“I have people to handle it. Risky but not impossible.”
I didn’t want to squirm, but I mean, come on. What if Nabi was?
Nauseous, I asked Char if I could lie on her bed. She got a chuckle out of this. She stretched out beside me and I turned, I shoved my face between her breasts, I forced her to be still and hug me. It made her impatient, but she settled down.
I pretended she was Nabi. Tried to hear Nabi’s music in the bloodless intonations of the predator. But a shadow crept over Nabi’s image, staining it black: the shadow of the woman at the Unfinished Church. All three of them were shadows, even Char, who studied her phone in my spiritless embrace. I took a peek and glimpsed Aetna’s photo of Faith Tabernacle. I remembered Nabi going there to help out, wondered who else had done the same, and my head spun: maybe I was the hurricane. If Nabi didn’t trust me, she used me and that’s all we amounted to. I grabbed Char by the face, I made her look at me. My voice snarled, “Tell me,” which made no sense at all. My fingers made rude indentations in her cheeks. Char extricated herself with little effort. She looked at me with loathing and triumph.
“You’re bereft,” she said. “It’s fucked you up for good. That means you’re perfect,” she concluded with all the warm affection of a geometric syllogism.
“Perfect for what?”
She sighed. And set out to complete my estrangement from myself.
It was all about power for her. Maybe if she’d bothered to think about it, she’d have called it colonial power. Corporatocratic imperialism or something. But that’s not all there was to it. Char’s was the power of the wounded, righteousness of the wronged. It was also a base competitive urge and the thoughtless fury of vengeance. Thoughtless? Well,
her way of overcoming her oppressors was going after those who were more powerless than she; setting up a secret fiefdom in a tiny country in the middle of nowhere, getting a desperate woman to do her bidding. Like Masami, really. Better to reign in Bermuda than be chained to a baby carriage pinned to the underside of some glass ceiling in the US or Japan. In fact, I wonder where Char found her inspiration.
But maybe I don’t need to explain all this to you. Maybe you’ve got your own rationale for robbing orphans. Maybe I’m just wasting your time, how about that? I’ll just tell you what happened. You need to know.
Char said, “Well, look at what you’ve done. In risk management, we answer questions with the simplest explanations that are easiest to prove.”
I said, “I gave you one. For Aetna.”
“Finally.”
“I tried to tell you earlier.”
“While you lied on every other point so you could get the research that you wanted.”
“Well, you’re the worst Doreen Trimm I’ve ever seen.”
She laughed, a sort of humph. The closest I’d ever seen her to tickled pink. Probably because all she had left to do was plant her flag.
“Gonna give you a free lesson in opportunism. Something you need to work on.” She tapped her phone and turned it.
Myrtle’s postcard, to my daughters… This little thing, this scrap: one word—a misplaced letter S, an overdone flourish, perhaps a Freudian slip on Myrtle’s part, in any case a myth—Char the hunter homed right in on it. She’d snapped a photo and zoomed in on the squiggle of opportunity.
“Things like this,” she said, “that people leave hanging around. Little ambiguous things. Never pass up a chance to make a thing like this mean something. Even if it was really just an accident. Use whatever else you know to turn it into something deliberate and significant. Something kind of shocking, even. So those who think they know the person will start to doubt themselves. She was very good at this. If you’d get your hands off me, I’d show you where the original has a bit of unmarked space where she could’ve—”
Drafts of a Suicide Note Page 33
