Drafts of a Suicide Note

by Wong, Mandy-Suzanne

  3 emails from 4 years ago. Subjects: names. Bodies: blank. Attachments are details that go with the names. Finances, education, employment, spouses, parents, children, personality, major events in their lives. But Lord help us, these people are all dead. Their names go with the file extensions on the first suicide notes.

  “W-2.” But you know, not really. She never asked me to do nothing with the IRS, & if she actually filed this thing they’d be all over her, I mean she cut off the top row! No social security thing! Very tacky for a (oh Lord) professional forger. She left in the part where it says “Clocktower.”

  After the first 3 “profiles,” she sent an email saying she didn’t want them online anymore. After that her emails contain times & places, nothing else. Someone went to meet her, I guess, with the “profiles” of (mercy) her “victims.” Here is what I did not find:

  Why did she do this?

  How in the world does somebody like her get mixed up in something like this?

  WHY did she make me do this & then go & leave papers lying around?!?

  Why did Kenji have to want so much to read them?

  It’s like reading hieroglyphics from Pluto. Some language that’s impossible. So the words don’t look like words, they look like impossible pictures. Kenji’s laptop & The Hand of Ethelberta & Bull’s Head & bank accounts…? & that’s just the email itself. It’s got 3 attachments I’m afraid to look at. The biggest one, no, I can’t.

  But the one with no name. He let his computer name it “Document1.” My finger moved & clicked like it was caught & pulled, like what his voice does to me when he speaks soft. & Baby wrote, “I tried.” He wrote, “I cherish you.” He wrote, “police” (!!). I’m telling you it don’t make sense. Like our computers garbled the code on its way over. The file with no name is longer than the Book of Jeremiah.

  I was vexed at 1st. Ya boy thinking he can talk his way out, bye’s got some crust, I thought. Especially when it’s talking, & him & his writing, that got us where we are in the first place. My best friend tried to undo the biggest achievement of my life. Course he don’t know it’s like that. You threw her in his path. Like You threw Bermuda in front of the Sea Venture. & the other woman, that American who cannot learn to keep track of her clothing, wasn’t that Your idea? All these years of prayer & worship & he finally asks me to marry him long after it’s too late so You just hand him over to some skank?! He made it all up, You say? To get attention? Well, why not?! How long have we been lying to each other? If he had that skank on one side & me on the other & if he was doing drugs & using BHS to launder drug money, that man was no friend of mine! But You know, I never saw him with no drugs, I never found them in his place, I know Kenji Okada-Caines would never destroy a book. He wouldn’t ask me to marry him & then go putting the munch on some longtail. You’re right, he made it up, he lied lied lied. He says “were” like our love is already over.

  Guess I can’t blame him for that. Even though life without him would be nothing but destroying machines, Yes Honey, Can I get an Amen. I know that. I know it’s too late for any more than that. Worker bees can’t walk out. They stick to their routine till their little hearts give out from exhaustion, but they Don’t Give Up.

  I keep reading & reading “Document1.” Some parts are true, not made up. Parts with both of us in them. True down to what I wore, what we had for dinner, how I said my words, where Kenji put his head. Behind Kenji’s words I hear his voice, his love & pain.

  But some of what he wrote just can’t be true. If it is, this email says Kenji’s either breaking up with me or not afraid to hurt himself. These things are not possible. So why do I feel like I’m falling out of my own head? At the dinner table one of the twins said grace, I couldn’t find my voice, dropped my niece’s hand & ran & fell on the bed bawling like I’d gone crazy. Iesha’s like: “Gonna be OK, happens to lots of couples, they survive,” she doesn’t know what I’ve done! K’s not answering my calls, my texts, my replying to his email saying “What does this mean, Kenji?!?” He’s not answering cuz I lied to him. I’m not Aetna Simmons.

  I liked her. I enjoyed her company. I thought she was a good person. She believed in me. She never doubted I could learn to do what she needed. She’s the only one who knows about my bumper car boys, knows I love 2 men, & unlike a certain sister in’t got nothin judgmental to say. She’s got so much she deserves to forget. & how many people get that chance, how many got a decent excuse to wipe the slate like she got, like she deserves? I believed in her. I Don’t Give Up on people I believe in. I ridiculed Kenji cuz I believed in her. & what did she do?

  She made innocent people look like sinners just so she could rob their families. & Kenji. My Kenji.

  

  Dear Nabi, dearest, dearest Nabi,

  I hate to burden you, but you’re the only one I trust. The attachments won’t explain everything, but they do try. I tried. I can’t honestly say I understand a damn thing. The only thing I know is that I cherish you.

  Please destroy my laptop. I’d do it myself, only I haven’t the strength. Destroy my phones too, if you would.

  Now, it seems to me that you’ll only be safe once the matter of Aetna Simmons is resolved in the public record. I could be wrong about that, you must always be careful, I’ve learned to mistrust everything I come up with, I’d go mad if I kept at it much longer. Do what you think is best, but I’d advise you to call the police and say I’m Aetna Simmons. I’ll write a note to that effect (attached).

  The keys for the MG, the Ethelberta, the flat, and the cabinets will be on the kitchen counter. They’re yours now. So are all the contents of the flat, my bank accounts, my investments, and my interest in Bull’s Head Shreds. Behind The Hand of Ethelberta, you’ll find a certain switch. I don’t have life insurance, it’d be useless to you anyway. Martin will help you. Take care of him. He tried to be kind to me. But above all, look after yourself and be happy.

  I have always loved you. You were the joy in my life.

  K

  Document1.docx (403 kb)

  TWIMC.docx (13.4 kb)

  AS1-10.pdf (4260 kb)

  His mouth was cold & dry, stained & stiff like an upturned shell left by a conch who’s abandoned it or rotted. Nothing flowed back into me except the chill of a dinner forgotten on the table. Car says 1:17, but I keep running up the hill in darkness, & the cold won’t leave my lips.

  While I am moving my pen & holding my book & straining to see by this sometimey streetlamp, I won’t be able to scream or walk back & forth outside. If I write everything down, it will become a bunch of letters, just a document, not the actual destruction of the world. I’ll write what Martin told me, too. Just so it will take longer. Maybe then it will be noon.

  I got Kenji’s email around sunset last night. I tried to call him. But then Martin called me. This is what happened to Martin:

  He heard Kenji tell a great big lie. He knew it was a lie cuz Martin always knows these things & Kenji was “not himself.” When he met Martin at our house, Kenji was very sleepy, he was “irrational,” “insisted on the opposite of what was there in front of him,” & threw up in the powder room. At 1st Martin thought none of this was serious. He thought Kenji deserved it a little (!). But then Kenji shouted at his momma: I’m Aetna Simmons. No, Baby, that’s a lie. But Martin knew he planned to turn the lie into the truth.

  Kenji ran out of CAM & Martin tried to tell his family. The mother said, “Enough for today, Mr Furbert.” She made Mr Motomura show Martin out. The brother thought Kenji was being “shrewd” &/or a “drama queen.” The father was on the telephone.

  Martin worried all day, but at the same time he believed there was “a healthy chance” that his worries “would prove to be unfounded.” He didn’t want to look stupid if Kenji was just protecting Erik or “acting out” to get attention. But a strong feeling made those “healthy chances” seem like the masks of evil clowns. He thoug
ht it would be silly to ignore Kenji’s “known penchant for overreaction” & the “expert opinions” of his relatives. But the feeling wouldn’t go away, & Martin knew it was the kind of feeling he should trust. When the sun began to fade, Martin found himself in the living room, unable to make up his mind. Then (he claims) he saw our wedding photo above the fireplace. That decided it, he told me. Well, whatever, but at least something got the man off his you-know-what.

  He called me. (I mean Martin.) I didn’t answer. I was reading “Document1.” Kenji wasn’t answering, I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t think I could just show up at his place cuz what if all this was Kenji breaking up with me while trying to save us both some dignity? That’s just an excuse, I was just scared. “Zo was starting to scare me…it filled my mind with water,” Kenji wrote. But no gut feeling came to link what Kenji wrote to Martin’s one & only phone call after days of silence. No sign, no Gentle Voice, no warning from whatever I’ve been praying to. Since I didn’t answer Martin texted: Go to Kenji NOW.

  I called him back in a freakout. He didn’t say hello, he said, “Kenji’s not answering his phone. I’m at his place right now, it’s dark, there’s no one here. Nabilah, where would he go?”

  Martin didn’t have to tell me what he was frightened of, & I couldn’t say it even though I thought I knew it was impossible. Martin said, “He says he’s Aetna Simmons. Where would he go to make that true?”

  All I had left of Kenji were words turned into digital signals turned into pixels. I scrolled thru the Unnamed file, I babbled, “I don’t know I don’t know.”

  “Think!!” Martin shouted.

  I shut my eyes & thought about my Baby, & I kept seeing his face as he knelt on the ground in so much pain. Come on, Baby, reach out. But he had! He wrote that Aetna’s truth was in her writing, & he thought the truth was courage, & the place where he imagined her showing the whole world that she was not afraid…

  “The Unfinished Church?”

  It was just a guess. Martin was doubtful cuz he hadn’t read what Kenji wrote, so we argued & I panicked & Martin got fed up & said, “Just go!” He promised to send the ambulance & meet me at the hospital. Iesha lives in Smiths so it would take me 20 mins. I stole her car keys & I ran.

  St G was pitch dark. Sir George’s heart under the obelisk, the ghost of the Deliverance, the slaves in unmarked tombs behind St Peter’s church, no cars, & so few lights. A whole city of ghosts. I was all alone, counting on the ambulance to show up right behind me, but it didn’t, of course not, it had to come from Paget. The Unfinished Church was a hunk of darkness on a dark hill. Halfway up, there was one tiny light.

  Kenji’s car. The inside light. The door hung open, I parked behind it & got out calling his name. Silence like the bottom of the sea. I checked the car (empty), grabbed Iesha’s emergency flashlight, ran up the hill screaming for my Baby. There was no moon, there were no stars, maybe that’s why it felt like the universe was already empty, I was too late always too late, I saw where Kenji threw up & kept climbing, & if it wasn’t for the flashlight, I may not have found him, it was so dark! The dark of hurricanes, when the electricity goes out & your house falls silent, all those quiet sounds you didn’t know it made just disappear, everything looks the same whether you close your eyes or open them, no God lives in that kind of dark.

  He was lying by the stump of what never got to be a pillar. Stupid not-a-pillar must’ve struck his head when he fainted. I’d never seen so much blood, & it was Kenji’s blood & I couldn’t wake him up. He wasn’t breathing.

  All that time in church did one thing for me. The choir & Bible Study group called for volunteers to learn CPR cuz there’s so many elderly at the meetings, so the trusty Furberts volunteered. What do I get for my trouble but a broken heart in a broken church under a burned-out sky, the man I’ve prayed for all my life dying in my lap? I had nothing to stanch the wound, the hot blood of my sweet genius spilled onto the grass. I put my mouth to his as we’d done in all those overdue nights.

  Used to be a blaze in Kenji’s kiss, the urgent glowing of a wish that just won’t stop. But his lips were cold & purple in the shadow of the ruin. I wanted to exhale every ounce of life from me to him, one great big whoosh. That’s not how you’re supposed to do it. Small puffs, chest compressions. But no matter how much I begged & puffed & screamed & puffed & shoved Kenji in the chest, he wouldn’t answer me.

  The ambulance came. EMTs took over rescue breathing, so all I could do was stand there drenched in Kenji’s blood. On the way to KEMH they got him to breathe a little by himself, but he couldn’t keep it up & I just couldn’t stand it, they ended up giving me the oxygen! The hospital lab found enough “hydrocodone” in my Baby “to kill an elephant” (Martin said that’s surely an exaggeration) & I blurted out “Zohytin” & kept blurting, “I don’t know what that is, I don’t know what that stuff is, I didn’t know he was taking medication, I don’t understand what he was doing,” & they said Zohytin is a super-strength form of hydrocodone that doctors give to people in constant unbearable pain. That’s when my knees gave out. Too bad there was a chair or maybe I’d have fell & broke something & Kenji wouldn’t have to spend the night alone.

  They hooked him up to a Naloxone IV. It has to keep flowing until he can keep breathing. The Naloxone should reverse the Zohytin, turn it off. But Baby took so much! Best case the reversal will be hard on him. Worst case Naloxone won’t be strong enough, I leave everything to my sister, the end.

  They wouldn’t let me see him after they took him away. Just cuz I missed my chance to be his wife. Martin & Iesha tried to take me home. I wouldn’t go, they went for Kenji’s car & then Iesha’s car, came back & tried again but I wouldn’t budge. I told them to leave. Martin kissed me on the cheek & I felt faint cuz that’s how Martin fed Kenji that poison. So did Iesha & Aetna Simmons & Kenji’s so-called family & most of all the “One” who abandoned us. Now I’m in Kenji’s car in the lot outside the hospital, smelling his smell & putting my cheek in the places where he put his hands, covered in his blood & drowning in his absence, wishing I could undo it all or take his place.

  

  TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

  I have lived more than one life. Altogether, they proved to be too much.

  You know me as a partner in Bull’s Head Shreds, son of Masami and Barrington Okada-Caines. Others know me as Aetna Simmons, forger of history. On behalf of the life insurance industry, I created suicide notes that by means unknown to me appeared at the scenes of recent deaths, ex post facto enabling my employers to invoke suicide clauses which obviate the payment of death benefits. A former tenant in a cottage belonging to Myrtle Trimm at Suffering Lane, St. George’s, I fled my home and employers when an attack of conscience forbade me to continue to my work. I apologize for the inconvenience subsequently incurred by the Bermuda Police Service.

  And now I choose the samurai’s escape. No one but myself is to blame for the misfortunes suffered by those who know me and bereft victims whom I will never know. As proof of my misconduct, I enclose ten suicide notes of my own authorship.

  Kenji Okada-Caines

  Back in hospital before visiting hours. Considered faking chest pain so they’d take me “backstage” & I could escape & find Kenji. Too chicken to try. A waiting room, his Unnamed docx on my phone: Kenji’s “fleshless visions.” Noon finally. Nurse said I couldn’t go in till I’d traded my bloody shirt for a clean gown. She said Kenji was breathing but “feeling a bit ill.” “Precipitated withdrawal”: if Zo knocked out his nerves, Naloxone shocked them all awake. The “discomfort” could last a few hours or days. “Like an overloaded fuse, only it will right itself.”

  Well, if that was supposed to prepare me, it failed. Regardless of what Kenji’s done, he doesn’t deserve eruption after eruption, jackknifing over & over, vomiting brutally even when the diarrhea started, I couldn’t watch & I had to, it’s the most awful thing I’ve ever seen
. & when he finally got to lie down, pain in his whole body made him cry out & thrash around. Big bandage on his head, bunch of stitches just above his temple. I stayed all afternoon, wiping his face & trying to hold his hand. He never noticed me. It’s the same now that he’s home. Pain & sickness are his world.

  Let me back up, I’m all over the place. KEMH kept him 2 days. Then they wanted to get rid of him cuz withdrawal isn’t “life-threatening” so his insurance won’t pay for any more hospital time. The ambulance took him to MAWI, the mental hospital (!). “Policy,” they said: he hurt himself so he’s crazy, he could do it again or try to hurt other people. Kenji wouldn’t hurt a fly, but they wouldn’t listen so I followed him to MAWI. Soon those lot were complaining cuz Kenji is so sick, they can’t evaluate him like this, they’re not trained to deal with “life-threatening illness,” KEMH should have kept him. Sigh! Squabbling between the hospitals & insurance co. Kenji ended up discharged from both. I wanted to give everyone a slap upside the head.

  Martin was good enough to pick us up. Kenji was severely carsick, M & I practically carried him inside. He was in the bathroom for hours, his body trying to rip itself to shreds, he almost didn’t make it to the bedroom before he passed out. We sat with him, watching his breathing.

  Me & my husband in the room where K & I made love.

  We didn’t have a clue what to say to each other.

  “You’re welcome,” said Martin. Stiff as a martyr in a bad religious painting.

  “Thank you for taking 5 mins to make a phone call, Martin. Thank you for not turning a blind eye to a fellow human being in trouble.”

  I don’t know why I chose that moment to pick a fight. We did it in whispers, K didn’t know a thing, poor sight.