Ladies and Gentlemen

by Adam Ross

  “You know,” Will told Alyssa, “death’s right here in this building.”

  Casey rolled her eyes at me. “Here we go.”

  “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”

  “No,” Alyssa said.

  “I’m talking about room nine-E.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Casey said.

  “What’s in nine-E?” Alyssa asked. She looked at Casey, then at me (and I’d heard all the stories). She was a double major in psychology and biology but lacked a single imaginative bone in her lovely body.

  “It’s the room where Patricia Wilkes hung herself from the pipes our freshman year,” Will explained. “It’s been boarded up ever since. Seeing as Miss Alyssa has never been in the presence of death, I say we break in there and have a look.”

  This was a nice play on Will’s part. If Casey was so pissed off at his flirting, for all he cared she could stay the hell put while he took Alyssa on a little adventure. From my end I thought it would give Casey and me some time alone, but she had that look on her face that she got when we had sex: the inwardness of someone testing a physical limit, like a dancer stretching a tender muscle. I’d watch her buck on top of me while this expression came over her and feel like I was almost incidental to her pleasure. All of which is to say I didn’t know what she was thinking.

  “Why would we want to go there?” Alyssa asked.

  “Because supposedly nothing in the room has been disturbed. All of Patricia’s family pictures are still inside. Her clothes are still in the drawers. Her Garfield posters are still up on the walls. Everything. It’s like a museum.”

  “Really?”

  “You’re pissing me off, Will.”

  I didn’t need this from Casey. She had a temper and things could go south between them in a hurry, and if they did there’d be no us, at least not tonight. She’d spend the next few hours, maybe even days, fighting with him, and their fights were notorious. At the beginning of the semester, just before we’d started up, she became convinced Will was having an affair with a friend of hers. The story was that she came into his room and confronted him about it. He was sitting at his computer and turned to her, calmly denied everything, and then went back to the paper he was writing, at which point she grabbed a large flashlight and smashed it right across his skull. Dazed, he stumbled out of his room with his head gushing blood, truly afraid for his life and concussed so severely that his feet were crossing one over the other like he was drunk, while Casey ran after him, sobbing and wailing, “I’m sorry, sweetheart, I’m so sorry, oh, Will, you fucking asshole, I’m so sorry.” I’d heard this story before I’d said a word to either of them. It preceded them, like the rumble you hear of a train when you put your ear to the rail. Their relationship had this sort of legendary dimension, and I was always impressed by their capacity to conflagrate or implode and inflict harm on each other.

  I wanted that. Not the violence, but the intensity of feeling. That summer, the weekend I’d spent at Alyssa’s house, on our last night together, after we tucked Danny in we made a bed of comforters on the floor in front of the television upstairs and screwed during Austin City Limits. Afterward, she sat up watching the show while I lay against the couch. Alyssa has large breasts, beautiful and upturned like ice cream curled in a scoop, her areolas brown as cocoa, and I stared at her while she watched the screen, her body’s edges traced in light. “I love you,” I told her. When she didn’t respond, I said it again, and even she knew I didn’t mean it. But I believed that if I verbalized it the feeling itself might come, as a vine grows toward the nearest higher thing. “I appreciate that,” she said, “I really do. But right now I don’t feel that way.” Then she went back to watching the show.

  Alyssa had a boyfriend at the time, Anthony Geddis, who played lacrosse with me. She showed up at all of our games, but I hadn’t noticed her until the end of the spring. On break I’d gone to Laguna Beach with a bunch of guys—eight of us piled into a VW bus, road-tripping south to Rosarito—and one afternoon we stood in a circle in the ocean and played a game of tag where the person who was “it” had to spit on someone, and if you managed to dive underwater before the gob hit you, you were safe. While we played we threw out names of girls at school, ranking them in order of beauty and desirability, skankiness and sexual prowess, responding to each like applause-o-meters, supplying inside information when required, and when Alyssa came up the reaction was so thunderously appreciative it could’ve attracted sharks. At that moment I decided she would be mine, no matter what. The minute we returned from spring break I pursued her with a relentlessness even I didn’t understand—until she finally broke down that summer. Once we got back to school in the fall, she confessed our affair to Anthony, we started dating again, and by September’s end she professed her love to me. “I’m yours,” she said, “you win.”

  Both the victory and the concession repulsed me deeply. A few weeks later, Casey and I started up.

  “I think I would like to see that room,” Alyssa said to Will, without looking to me for approval. I became paranoid again. Was she breaking up with me? Had she been doing it with him all along? Did Will lace my joint with cyanide? Grass makes you an ass.

  They got up to leave, and since I never took the lead with Casey, I waited to see what she was going to do. She stood up, crossed her arms, and with one hand indicated the door, so I obediently walked ahead. I wasn’t sure what to think about this. Maybe she sensed I was kind of reeling, because before we were out of the room she slid up behind me, squeezed my ass and, in what I took to be a boost to my failing morale, sang, “Don’t fear the reaper,” waiting, I guessed, for me to sing the next line—or at least to buck up.

  I wasn’t afraid of death so much as getting in trouble. According to dorm rules, the suicide room was off-limits, and Will needed very little encouragement to do something risky. He was currently in an ongoing competition with Johnny Manion, a rugby player and all-around psycho, in which they attempted to do “the craziest thing.” The game had started up a few weeks ago and was like a hybrid of Uncle and Chicken. If you couldn’t top the other person’s feat, you lost, each successive stunt requiring increased levels of recklessness and potential pain. Will began by sneaking into the chancellor’s office and replacing the picture of her husband with one of John Holmes, the porn star. Manion considered that bush-league and proceeded to appear in an art-history class completely naked. Not to be outdone, Will jumped from the third story of the chemistry building onto a small sofa. This put him on crutches for two weeks, but sent Manion pondering. A week later, he stood with us outside his terrace apartment during a keg party and, in a moment of inspiration, began to eat moths, plucking them one by one off the wall by his porch light. His lips were covered with moth dust afterward; he looked like he’d been snacking on a crumb cake made of slate. He ate fifteen in all. At this point, Will considered conceding, but then got his nerve back. “I’m still in,” he told Manion, nodding determinedly. “I didn’t doubt it for a second,” Manion said, then vomited in a steady stream at our feet. That was a week ago. Will was planning his next move.

  It was a Friday night, but early enough in the evening that in order to break into 9-E we’d need some kind of distraction. There’d be people milling around the halls, playing music, hanging out in their rooms, and since I was a follower in this expedition I let Will sort out the details. We took the elevator upstairs, but Will pushed the eighth floor instead of the ninth. When the door opened he said, “You three go up. I’ll be right there.” He walked out of the elevator and looked up and down the hall, then said hello to someone. The elevator door closed. It was a slow car, and as we rose we heard the building’s fire alarm go off. By the time the door opened on nine, people were heading for the stairs.

  We waited in the hallway for the floor to clear out. There was a guy still sitting in his room, blowing a bong hit out the window. “You fucking lemmings!” he screamed over the quad. The three of us were standing in his doorway
and he turned around to look at us. “Don’t be fooled,” he assured us. “It’s just another false alarm. It’s always a false alarm!” he screamed toward the quad again. “So unless I see flames, I’m squatting.”

  Will appeared at the stairwell and led us to the infamous room. At the end of the hall, 9-E was literally boarded up, with two-by-fours X-ed across the frame. We stood there a minute while Will rubbed his chin. He yanked at one of the boards, even pressed both feet against the wall and pulled, but it was hopeless. They were screwed into the jamb. He looked around, said “Stay here,” then opened the window at the end of the hallway and climbed out. Alyssa, Casey, and I watched him step over the fire escape’s railing and move out of sight.

  A few seconds later we heard a window break. Then the door opened.

  “Welcome,” Will said, standing behind the Xs in the door frame, “to the suicide room.”

  He helped us through the spaces between the boards, and closed the door.

  I admit my heart was racing. Once my eyes adjusted to the dark—the overhead bulb had long since burned out—I took in our surroundings. The room was noticeably colder than the hallway, and the floor was dusty. Realizing the place was empty of artifacts, I was more afraid for my sinuses than my soul. The bed frame was still here but the mattress was gone. The bureau was empty. We looked up at the pipes but didn’t expect to see any signs of a hanging, since we’d all dangled from them in our rooms at one time or other, had chin-up contests or monkey bar races along their length. But Alyssa was impressed that we were actually here and, wanting to give Will some sort of credit for his efforts, she crossed her arms and rubbed them with her hands and said, “It’s cold as death.”

  Will glanced at me, and we both rolled our eyes.

  “How the hell did you get in here?” Casey said.

  “The window.”

  Casey walked over to the broken window and looked down. Alyssa and I joined her.

  “I know the window, dickweed, but how did you get to the window?”

  Will pressed between us and poked his head out.

  “I climbed over the fire escape,” he said, pointing, “then walked along this ledge and kicked in the pane.”

  The ledge was perhaps two inches wide. It jutted out from the building and was decorated every few feet with remarkable gargoyles. I figured the distance from the fire escape (nine feet), looked for handholds in between (none I could see), considered the height (nine stories), then factored in the nerve and coordination required for such a maneuver—including the logistical difficulty of having enough of a purchase to kick in the window—and I almost didn’t believe it.

  “You’re a sick boy,” Casey said.

  “You think people really die if they dream of falling and then land?” Will asked.

  “That’s a myth,” Alyssa told him. “Like wanting to sleep with your mother.”

  “But if it isn’t, is that considered suicide?”

  “Me,” Casey declared, “I’d gas myself. I’d do a Sylvia Plath. It’d be like an eternal whip-it.”

  “You mean ‘the whip-it to eternity,’ ” I said.

  Casey made a face at me. “What-fucking-ever.”

  “I can’t imagine anything more selfish,” Alyssa said, “than taking your own life.”

  I looked down the nine-story drop and considered my own options if I were to commit suicide. Things could go wrong with a hanging. The cord might snap. The pipe might bend and break. Failure could mean brain damage. Same with sticking a gun in your mouth. If you slashed your wrists you might lose your nerve during the time it took to bleed out, leaving you with nothing to show for it but scars that signified your own treacherous neuroses—aces up your sleeves, if you were comparing extreme personal experiences, but ultimately a party trick that embarrassed the magician. Or you could just fail somehow. Fail stupidly. Clumsily. Failure at committing suicide, I thought, could have worse lasting effects on a person than any missed at-the-buzzer jump shot or misspelled word during a spelling bee. It was a real-life failure, a lack of planning and attention to detail that would follow you through your days like a prison record. Fail at this, I figured, and chances were good that you’d permanently doubt your ability to carry off anything difficult for the rest of your life.

  “I’d jump,” I said, but no one seemed to be listening.

  The fire alarm stopped. You don’t realize how quickly you adjust to noise until it ceases.

  “We should probably leave,” Will suggested.

  We climbed out through the boards, but instead of going back downstairs to Will’s room we climbed out the hall window and sat down on the fire escape. Nine stories below, the fire engines had arrived in the quad, their strobes spinning silently, and we sat in the warm night with our feet dangling through the bars and watched as the firemen walked into the building, helmets off, their own keen sense for false alarms confirmed. Hundreds of dorm kids milled around in the red and white light, unaware that all of this was nothing serious, a lie like the one I’d told about my grandfather. And in that quiet moment watching this sight, I enjoyed the nearest thing I can remember now to an animal peace. I was content. I suffered no thoughts of the future, had no stress or worries or responsibilities and was briefly, blissfully aware of this. We were well above the tops of the trees, which were many stories high themselves, and in the building’s floodlights they cast massive shadows, the wind playing through their leaves like a long, steady aspiration, as if the world itself were breathing. The fact was I didn’t suffer enough from anything to seriously consider suicide or any other self-destructive act, and I wonder now if that’s enough to be thankful for. Is a life of such relative luxury and comfort an embarrassment of riches, or a horrible sort of poverty?

  This moment was interrupted by the appearance of Johnny Manion, who sat down cross-legged behind Will and pointed at his watch. “Time’s running out, Will. The glove’s been thrown down, and you’ve got to make a move.”

  “I know. I’ve been mulling it over and I think I’m ready.”

  “I know I’m ready,” Manion said. “I’m ready to be wowed.”

  As I mentioned, he was a rugby player, a flanker. He had a beak nose, hooked at the end like a vulture’s, bugged-out eyes like Marty Feldman’s, and a high head of uncontrollably curly hair. This, I thought, was someone who looked in the mirror every morning and thought: Why? He didn’t have the bulk you’d imagine someone in his sport would need. But I’d played touch football against him, and he was deservedly famous on campus for his speed and split dodge, the latter so devastating it nailed your cleats to the turf. He had thighs that were thickly muscled and disproportionately large, like the tires on a redneck’s monster pickup.

  “It’s going to be untoppable,” said Will. “It’s going to demand your instant concession of victory.”

  “I’m quaking,” Manion said. “I’m listening carefully.”

  “Honestly, the idea itself is so daring that you might have to concede before I even begin.”

  “I don’t underestimate you, Will, I never have, and what I’m feeling right now, inside my chest, is basically suspense.”

  “I’m going to kill myself,” Will said.

  Nobody reacted as if this statement were remotely out of the ordinary.

  Manion nodded. “Strong. Inspired. Still, I don’t believe you.”

  Casey was ignoring Will, so he leaned toward her.

  “I am going to kill myself,” he said, “because no one gives a shit if I do.”

  He leaned across me to say this to her, and in profile they looked alike, with the same long, delicate nose and Roman profile. He, too, had thin lips and long limbs, and a strong grip that surprised you. He and Casey could be brother and sister.

  She rolled her eyes.

  “But you’re right,” Will said to Manion, sitting back. “I’m not going to kill myself. But if I were to kill myself”—he leaned toward Casey again—“I’d do it only out of deep passion. Because I would’ve been brave en
ough to let myself be shattered. I would do it as a testament to some sort of remarkable love, the kind that you read about in Shakespeare or Tolstoy or who-the-fuck-ever. But something you protect at all costs. Do you get it?”

  Manion cleared his throat. “No. But does that mean I win?”

  Will relaxed again and slumped forward, letting his arms dangle through the bars. It was hard to tell if this monologue was simply a performance or a true expression of emotion, but I took it as the latter. I loved being around Casey and Will, because in their presence I felt I was in contact with real feeling. I had the sense, watching them carefully, quietly, that I was witnessing something ineluctable. They needed each other so much they’d already lost the ability to imagine life apart. When you’re nineteen years old, need like that is a remarkable thing to observe.