A Cure for Suicide

by Jesse Ball

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  Do you ever convince people to go through with it? After some point? I asked the interlocutor. He shook his head. Never, never. Then, he thought better of it, of this thing he had said, and he began to speak: There was a man who came to me, right at the beginning, said the interlocutor. I was not very good at this job, yet. I didn’t know exactly how to go about doing it. No one did, really. We were still working out all those things, for ourselves and for each other. But, then, at that time, there were many people, as there always are, who needed our help. We could not fail to do the job because we didn’t know how to do it. Then, at that time, not knowing how to do the job, we still had to do the job. It was in this way that we learned the work, and came to our present expertise. In any case, this man, this case that I am telling you about, he came to me first thing in the morning. We have a consensus, we who do this work, said the interlocutor, that the people who come first thing in the morning are the ones in the greatest danger. It is easy to feel at night, or in the loathsome stretch of the afternoon, that all things are near to their end. But, in the morning, the bright morning, to wake and go forth, and feel utterly confined to a brittle wash of apathy or misery, that is something else. So, when he arrived in the morning time, right when I was arriving, in fact, I had a premonition. He was a librarian, and a poet. He had published many books of his verse. This is what the secretary said to me, coming into my office ahead of him, in order to fill me in. I’m just filling you in on the details, she said to me. Nowadays, I would never allow such a thing. As you can see, we operate entirely without secretaries. They are unimportant in this enterprise. Also unimportant is—to be warned of anything. All that I need to know, the person himself, he or she will tell me. And that is crucial. The interlocutor became very animated. He shook his fist. It is crucial that a person be allowed to pierce the veil of their appearance and show me the person that he or she really is, beyond the apparent state of his/her being. But, at the time, he continued sadly, I hadn’t yet worked those things out, and so I was forewarned. I called the man in. In fact, I had read a book of his poems before. I actually owned one book of his poems, given to me by a friend. They were wonderful poems. I dislike poetry, as it is mostly bad, the interlocutor confided to me, but when poems are good, they are better than anything, better than cinema, novels, theater, song, so said the interlocutor. He was speaking on and on, and I realized I had lost track of what he was saying. I was tired, and I had practically drifted off, but not into sleep. I was just numb, sitting there numb. He was still talking, and I tried to listen. He said, there are, though, only a few good poems, and this man had written one or two of them. I made the mistake of, during our speech, as he told me what he expected for his life going forward and how he wanted nothing to do with it, I made the mistake of actually employing a turn of phrase that he himself used in one of his poems. I don’t know how it happened, I must have, my mind must have been repeating the poem quietly to itself as he spoke, comparing his speech with what I had read, and so the phrase was there, in the ether, and I snatched it up, trying to say something calm and gentle to him. But, rather than saying something calm and gentle to him, I triggered the worst conceivable reaction. Whereas before I had spoken, the place we were sitting was completely safe, was a calm, cool place for him to be, a sort of perch from which he could look out on other lives—a place from which he could go out without the clothing of his own life, to seek new things, whereas it had been that, as soon as I spoke, it suddenly became a place where he was known, where he might be remarked upon. In that moment he lost his humanity, and became a kind of organ grinder. It was as though I had asked him to dance like a bear. But, perhaps it was all for the best, continued the interlocutor, because, and the reason I am telling you all this is still to come, it forced me to come up with a formulation that could rise above the error I had made, and bring him back to peace. Just as you have a sense of yourself, and propagate that sense of yourself with your tales and personal legends, so he had the same. His was, though, completely poisoned. He was as weak as a child, not in that chair where you sit, but in another very much like it, not in this office, but another precisely like it, the mirror of it. I said to him, it is a fallacy to divide thing from thing, and it brings us all our pain. You have spent so long discriminating, finding the least possible, finest discriminations until you are capable of saying how this leaf differs from that, or the way in which a window, an unapproachable window high overhead, can contain all our feelings of helplessness, that you now seek only to divide, even when you think you seek nothing. We have a help that can be offered to you. You can resume, can easily resume, the business of being a person—not this person, or that person, but a person. And you can stay that way. We can provide you with an unspecific life. And so, for the first time, I broke the rules. We are never to attempt to convince anyone. That is not our job. But, I felt certain, sitting there, that I had taken away the purpose with which he had arrived, and that he would never come again. In fact, I convinced him to take the cure. I administered it to him that very day. A digression, he said, quite a digression, but an answer to your question. I will always try to give you the truth if you ask me for it. He adjusted his suit and looked up and down the pant leg, as if there were something there. I had been listening to him, but not carefully. I was still in the mountains, still pretending in my own way to be sitting with Rana, looking at her, and being looked at by her. So, I continued, telling the interlocutor, saying to the interlocutor that I have never had much thought for myself. I said, continuing, I have always drifted from place to place, thinking myself the least of the matters near to me. I have never felt wronged when someone has gone on ahead of me. But, she, she would feel wronged, I could imagine, hearing her speak of me, on my behalf. What she thought of me was far more than what I thought of myself. And so, she wanted nothing more than to talk of plans. Her idea of our future was a large and bountiful one. All the ideas that she wove spread out like ink in water—we would have a garden, a house with a garden. There would be a garden on the roof of the house, and on the wall that ran around the house. The paths would be made of stone and moss. The house would have thick glass windows like portholes. No, it would have no windows, none at all. We would be living outside, essentially, in the garden. No, we would live under the house in a kind of burrow, and emerge now and then into a garden, a garden we spent most of our time tending. It would be cool there in the summer and warm in the winter. It could be outfitted with fine wood like a nordic spa. It could be marvelous. The windows could be paper. Whenever they tore, we could simply place another window there. She became gripped and her ideas ran on and on, on and on. I felt that it was disturbing her, that this talk of our future was making her weak. I was sure that she was growing weaker. It seemed that the altitude and this flurry of speeches, one speech after another that she was giving to me or I to her, were tiring her. But, she became angry, and actually said coldly to me, if I didn’t want to have such conversations, we need not do so. Of course, I wanted to—and so we did. Then, suddenly she was happy again. We sat on the daybed of the house, and she said, do you know what, I once earned a degree. A degree, I asked. A degree, she said. Sitting there on the daybed, she told me that she had once earned a degree in philosophy. The school where I went, they only taught philosophy. It was a college just for that. We would take courses in math and science and literature, but all of it, only in the service of philosophy. The idea was, she related to me, that everything is useless without philosophy, because, not having the proper philosophy, one will never know how to apply anything, how to apply the things one knows. Then, one can only mimic other people, follow after them. One can never apply anything in one’s own right. She told me that she had taken a course with a professor, that he had offered a course on a man named Jens Lisl. Lisl was a great philosopher, she said, but he was mostly unknown, and no one wanted to take the class, no one but Rana, and s
o the professor, who already had a high opinion of her, he told her that they could make the course a thesis course, and that she could write a thesis on Lisl, if she was so interested in him. She laughed, telling me this. She had signed up for the course on a whim, because she liked the name, Jens Lisl. But the professor was sure that he had intimations of her seriousness. He called her to his office, actually to his office in the ivy-run school building, past the secretary, and all the other offices, and he sat her down and he said, Miss Nousen. I think that you are more serious than most, and I believe that you can make a contribution to the efforts that have so far gone forward in the study of Lisl. Lisl, Jens Lisl! She laughed. A name I did not even know. I had not read Lisl yet, I said. I am sure of it, he told me. This is a certain proposition. So, the last two years of my study, I did not take regular classes, as the way was with all the other students, but I took this one class, Lisl, with this one professor, and we wrote several papers, actually together, my contributions and his, about Lisl. I mentioned then to Rana, so I told the interlocutor, that I had never heard of Jens Lisl. No one has heard of him, she said. He is a sort of amalgam, as it turns out. He is an amalgam that serves as the core of a philosophy of inevitability. It is also sometimes called Modern Inevitability, or, the New Inevitability. It is a rethinking of determinism. We worked on these ideas for two years together. I was nineteen when we began, nearly twenty, and when we were through, I was twenty-two. I graduated, and never thought about any of it again, really. Sometimes, the professor sends me letters, but I don’t read them. I believe, she said, that he was in love with me. You like to say that, I said. She blushed. She was always very serious. I do think that he was in love with me. I told her it wouldn’t surprise me. Everyone would fall in love with her, given time. But, not if they know how I really am, she said, the way you do. At that point, I said, most would abandon you. I agreed with her, and told her that anyone, actually getting to know her, would get rid of her in an instant. This was extremely funny and we laughed for some time. I didn’t tell you, she said suddenly, that I had earned a degree out of pride. I am not proud or ashamed of it. Like most things in my life, I am not proud of it, nor am I ashamed of it. It will just be hard for you to understand me, if you don’t know that I spent a long time on work like that. When I am cutting a carrot you can think of it, and understand me better.

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  It was my idea the following day that if she was strong enough, we should take another walk into town. She wanted to, but felt that we should wait a day. I insisted that it would do her good, that waiting a day might just make her settle into a sort of lassitude from which she would only emerge when we had returned to the city, and then we would have lost the opportunity once more to see the town. We might never come back here again, I said. Oh, we shall come back many times, she disagreed. But, all the same, I forced her out the door, and we made it about a quarter of the way to the town before I realized what an awful idea it had been. She was absolutely overtaxed. She could barely stand. We stood there in a sort of alpine clearing, the path going up on one side and down on the other. Even the vegetation appeared taxed. I can go no further, she said. She didn’t say anything. She would never say that she couldn’t go on. It wasn’t her way. Instead, she sat there and wept soundlessly. That was her way of giving up. I carried her back to the house and installed her again in the daybed. I got her water and some food. Then, I drove down into town to fetch more things, and returned, and made her supper. By the evening, she was feeling better again, although she was weaker than I had ever seen her. She had taken off her clothing. She wore just a loose pair of pants and a shawl. She lay on the bed, her head propped on a pillow. When I entered the room, she smiled. When I came again, with supper, she sat up and, leaving the shawl, came to me there in the middle of the room. She was mad with energy, then, I told the interlocutor. But, as soon as we were finished, she was exhausted again, and I had practically to feed her the supper spoon by spoon.

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  When supper was through, I told her about my visit to the town. I told her the wineseller had been talking to me about her brother’s death again. She said that he always talks about it. He had a son who was best friends with my brother, and the family took it hard. In fact, the wineseller himself was probably her fifth or sixth cousin, related at some insurmountable distance. I had mentioned this thing, my conversation with the man, as a way of gaining territory. I wanted her to feel that I was conversant with the town and with the past. That even, separate from her, I could navigate the waters of her past and of her family’s past, and that furthermore, to others I was identifiable as someone connected to her. All of this was present when I had said, the wineseller talked more to me of your brother. But, if this statement had the effect that I wanted, I did not see it. Rather, it plunged her into a sadness in which she could think only of her family illness. She wanted to speak of it with me. Now she would tell me about it. The family illness. Before, she hadn’t said anything of it to me, but now perhaps it was good for me to know, and why not from her, rather than from strangers like this wineseller, who, after all, does not know the real account, or the real ideas, but goes along filling in the narrative with his own creations, or so she supposed. You wouldn’t believe, I told the interlocutor, how carefully she laid out these mental objects, the mythology of her family’s illness. She said to me that she had never spoken about it to anyone before, to anyone who had not had complete knowledge about it, and so, she would be clumsy in talking. She was unused to ignorance on this subject, as everyone in her family possessed knowledge about it that predated her own. Still she would try. She told me that her family was known, in the places where they historically had owned land, as a family of effete languishers. They were practically defined by their illness. One after another, for seven hundred years, as far back as the family goes, the illness has struck again and again. The only way out of it, she confided, is to die in some physical accident. Even in this age of medicine, there has been no advancement. And why? Because, she said, it is not worth it for the world at large to put medical resources to work on a problem that affects .000000014 percent of the population. I don’t know if that is the actual number, she said, but if it isn’t that one, it is one like it. During the Renaissance, the family had been wealthy, much wealthier than they are now, and they had employed doctors specifically to find a cure. Of course, the state of medicine was such that it was useless. They tried to cure it with alchemy. This was not a joke. Vast wealth had been spent trying to save her family from an illness using alchemy. If it had worked, her brother would still be living. In fact, before that, before her brother’s death, when she allowed herself to think about the illness more often, it had occurred to her, and she had once actually said so to her father, that the money had been ill spent. Ill spent? Her father had not understood. His daughter, eight years old, was standing before him, telling him that their fifteenth-century predecessors had misspent funds. What could she mean, so I told the interlocutor, that’s what she said to me, explaining her father’s turn of mind concerning his young daughter’s statement. I told him, she said, continuing, that if our ancestors had set aside the sum used to employ those doctors, quite a large sum, and set those monies at compound interest for all of the time until now, medicine would have changed, would have become useful, actually useful, as it is now, rather than useless, as it was then, and we would have the money to employ scientists and doctors to find a cure. Her father and mother had enjoyed this idea very much, and had often brought it out as evidence of their daughter’s brilliant impudence, relating it at dinner parties. So often have they told it, so Rana said to me, sitting there in my arms on the daybed, that I tired of it and never wanted to hear the story. But I tell it to you now, as it makes sense to hear it. The other idea that was had, and this was a very good idea—it was had during the nineteenth century, by some woman of the family who went on to be an abbess, who actually left the family to be an abbess. All the s
ame, she had an idea for the family, as a young woman, while still with the family. That idea was: we could benefit from marrying others, and not marrying with the group of ourselves. Breed it out of us, so she said. Although this suggestion was taken very seriously, it could not be effected. Why was that? I asked her. The reason is this: almost no one in my family can tolerate the presence or conversation of those not in my family. Although we are in some sense a populous family, although in each generation there are between seven and ten children, every house a full house, she said, still it is true that it remains the same blood. Cousins marry cousins marry cousins. Occasionally sister marries brother. And why? Because we are all so sensitive. We simply cannot bear to speak with or be with other people. Therefore, a feeling grew up in the family, within the family, one never spoken of, that the illness is simply what we deserve. She told me this and I told the interlocutor, saying it with the same emphasis she used, what we deserve. That my father, for instance, she continued, deserves to die based upon his parents’ inability to tolerate the company of regular people. That my brother deserved to die based upon my father’s inability to tolerate anyone other than my mother. But, what about, I said, you and I have met and we are together. If we were to have children…I don’t think I need to tell you, she said, what the general feeling is in my family about you. It is regrettable, but we shouldn’t hide from it. She laid her head against my neck. It isn’t your fault, she said, but they don’t really want to see you around. They have, you see, certain things that they want to talk about, and they only want to talk about those things, and they only want to talk about them in a particular way. You could imagine yourself, perhaps, now, as we sit here talking, thinking of a way that you could isolate, through careful study, what are the exact things that my parents, and their brothers and sisters, my great-aunts, my great-uncles, the whole clan of them, settled at a long table or beneath an arbor at a gathering, would want to talk about, what those things are and what they are not. You imagine now that you could isolate, she used the word again, these things, and that having done so you could take part, meritoriously, in such a conversation. But, in fact, it just isn’t true. You would begin to say something and immediately you would go awry. You would miss a subtlety of phrasing, and a feeling would spread through the crowd—disdain. It wouldn’t be your fault at all. Darling, I feel that you are their equal, that you are equal to every last one of them, even to them all gathered together. Wasn’t I the one who said, let us go to a foreign city? Didn’t I say it just yesterday or the day before? I did. Yet, you aren’t good enough for them, not in the way that you want. And when I am there, with them, it is even hard for me, much as I champion you, to listen as you put your foot wrong again and again and again. Even when we speak of something like, the last time you came to visit the house, you see now what a thing it has been for me to have you visit, and still, I had you visit again and again and again, don’t you see what that means, well, when you last came to visit—there was said, my father, he told us a story about his work. You remember, he said that he was conducting an examination of the Hruezfeldt dam, along with two of his brothers, who are all amateurs by the way, none of my family has ever professionally done anything, nonetheless they are brought in to consult often on matters of every sort by government, because of their extreme expertise. You recall that he said the problem of the dam was not a physical problem, but an economical problem. The government itself, in its maintenance of the dam, might as well be standing there at Hruezfeldt with its finger blocking the dam. That was the manner in which the Hruezfeldt dam problem was holding back the province at large from taking effective action in any number of spheres. Do you remember what you said then, in response? She remembered, I told the interlocutor, the entire conversation, a conversation I had utterly forgotten. I had to tell her that I did not remember. At that very moment I wanted to be for her a person who remembered everything and who therefore perhaps, beyond all possibility, possessed a chance of earning her father’s respect. But even in that one minor incident of our conversation about a conversation, even there, away from her family, I was forced to capitulate and explain that I could not remember what had been said, so I told the interlocutor shamefully. He looked on, waiting for me to continue.