A Cure for Suicide (16 page)

You must be used to what, I asked. What brother, I asked. I didn’t know you really had a brother. What was he talking about? The proprietor had gone away, and we sat there in that village, at a table in the street, and Rana was looking at me with her bright, lovely face, and her hair was falling all over, and her posture in the chair was graceful, so graceful, I almost couldn’t bear it. I could see that she was tired again, I could see she didn’t want to speak, but she was bearing up, and part of it was in her raising up of her chin and her shoulders, and it stretched her dress against her body and she was breathing in and out with difficulty. If I had ever loved anybody, I thought to myself, and I kept saying, tell me. What did he mean? She shook her head. I wasn’t hiding anything from you. I just didn’t mention it yet. My brother, he died when he was a boy. I told you about him—with the bats, the bats. He died of the same thing as my grandparents. It goes that way in my family. Most of them die of the same thing. That’s why he asked about my father. He is not very old, though, my father. He is not going to die. What is it, I asked. Now we were walking again. I was carrying a canvas bag with all the groceries, and a flask of the wine over my shoulder, and we were walking back up the hill to the lodge. We would stop occasionally so she could rest, and then we would continue. The exertion and the mountain air made her eyes bright and fierce, and she would look at me and it was as if the sudden sight of me pleased her. That was a thing that was different with her than with everyone else I had ever known. With everyone else, they would come into a room and I would be standing there, and they would see me and recognize that I was there, and then something would happen, an action or a conversation. It would proceed directly from their recognition of knowing me, or their recognition of not knowing me. Something about me would activate in their head, everyone I had ever known, and in the space of a moment, some action would occur and I would be enmeshed in it, or I would be separate, I would push myself away from it, and be distanced. That was the usual thing. But, with Rana, whenever it happened that she didn’t know I was somewhere, or whenever she was away in her mind thinking, and forgot that I was there, then it would happen, so I told the interlocutor, her eye would come upon me, and an absolute leaping delight would rise in it. I would see that her whole being was gladdened. She had seen me—I was near! For me, this was hardly to be believed. I didn’t know what it was at first, until I knew, and then it was a thing that I could only be grateful for—a thing I could never deserve. In the mountain air, she was sitting on a rock and she was looking at me, and her eyes flashed with that same light. It is a sickness, she said, that makes your body unable to defend itself. Slowly you die of something else. And because there is always something else, always
something else.
Stopping any one particular something-else doesn’t call a halt to it. My grandfather died, and my grandmother, who was related to him—in my family cousins often married—must already have been battling it, and when he died, she gave in. My brother gave in when I was fifteen. Everyone
gives in.
That’s how we talk about it, she said, my father to me, and my mother, my brother even, my cousins, my aunts.
He gave in. She gave in. After a time, it was too much, and he gave in. Then she had no choice but to give in also.
How do you know if it has begun? I asked. Have you ever had any sign of it yourself? She blinked and smiled. She actually laughed, so I told the interlocutor. Me, no. No, not me. I’ve always been just fine. Why would you think that? I said that she had been weak of late. She said, it is just the altitude. Haven’t you felt weak as well? This was, she said, in any case, a good climate for the illness. That’s why my grandparents had been here in the first place. The family had settled part of their estates here, hundreds of years back, because it was a good place for convalescence. Of course, she continued, all that land is long gone. Just the hunting lodge remains. You are fine, I asked. Are you? Stop it, she said, hitting me lightly on the arm. I’ll beat you up the hill. Then, she went ahead of me up the slope, I told the interlocutor, and I could only hurry after her, burdened with all our purchases. When we reached the house, she was exhausted. Her face was sunken, and she could only lie in the downstairs daybed, breathing softly. I helped remove her clothing, and looked at her body there on the bed beneath me. I undressed and lay beside her. We are as far away, she said, as anyone can be from anything, here. Do you like that feeling? I asked her. I like it, she said. I have longed for it. I entered a state, so I told the interlocutor, wherein I was with her and I was watching us both from a point beyond. Somehow, I could see that we were in the house, going about the house, making meals, eating meals, playing cards or chess, sitting out late drinking wine and talking of nothing at all, or sitting close together on a bench with our heads inches apart, talking with great direction of particular and very important things, these things I could see as from a great distance, and from up close. I could see as though out of my own eyes, and out of the eyes of another. I feel it was some circumspection that had grown around me. She said suddenly, after we had been there four days, I want to make all of our plans. What plans, I asked. All of them, she said, I want to make all of the plans that we will make for our future, I want to make every one. I want to make the plans for what we will do now, while we are young. I want to make plans for what we will do partway through our careers, when we are in our primes, and the world has received our gifts with great gladness and even approbation. I want to make plans for our old age, for what we will do when we are old and the world opens again—to the separate wishes we have then, when for us everything will have changed, everything but that we will still want—that I will still want you with me. This she said to me, I told the interlocutor. This person who was so far above me, not just in terms of wealth or birth, but in actual human evaluation. I am sure of it, as sure of it as I could be of anything, that if a group of the finest people that had ever lived were to see to her and look her over, speak to her and know her, they would set her high, high above me, so high that I would never have met her or known her. I said, I can scarcely believe that it did happen, that we did meet, but we did, and for some reason she recognized me as something like herself, although in this I think that she was wrong. Where she was courageous and strong, willful, passionate, clever, I was cowardly, weak, forever bowing beneath the weight of things I did not understand and could not. Perhaps I will be a doctor in a small town, she said. We will find a small town where so little is known of medicine that we can smatter together some portion of knowledge and I could be a doctor and you could be my helper. We would do what we could for people, and not just for people. Perhaps it would be a place so basic that the same person deals with animals and people. Not a human hospital, not a veterinary hospital, just a hospital. She said this, laughing at herself in a way, laughing at her plans and her planning, but delighting in it. She had no intention of being a doctor. By this she was teaching me how to enjoy her planning, and her work of ideas. We shall take pleasure in everything, she was saying—in things, and in the hope of things.

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 so 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.