Jesse Ball - A Cure for Suicide

Whenever he didn’t have things to do, the old woman found something for him to do. But when he had something to do, she was never there.

The man liked the pants that he wore, and there was a day when he put all the clothes on by himself and came down the stairs by himself, and worked on a thing he had decided to do by himself and ate by himself and it was not until the evening that he saw her. Then they sat on the closed porch and she lit a candle and it was a sort of celebration.

AND ON THE SEVENTIETH DAY, the man spoke.

— CAN I, the water.

The examiner sat quietly looking at the claimant. She said nothing.

— Can you give me the water?

His words were clear and distinct.

She picked up the pitcher of water with both hands and gravely presented it to him.

— Here you are, she said.

— Thank you, said the claimant.

The examiner nodded and went back to what she had been doing as if nothing remarkable at all had just happened.

SHE DID NOT begin to speak to him until two days had passed. Until then, she would answer him when he spoke, and speak to confirm the sense of what he had done.

But, when she began, she spoke with full diction and clarity.

— I am the examiner, she said. It is my purpose to help you. I have no purpose but that. I live here in this house. This house is the place where you live. We live in this house together. We are together in completing something. The thing that we are completing is your recovery. You were very sick. You were totally incapacitated by an illness. You almost died. When you were on the point of death, you were rescued, and now you are being brought back to health. There is every reason to have real optimism about your chances. I feel certain that things will go well for you, and though you do not know what lies ahead, you may rely on me.

— Where…

He swallowed.

— Where are we?

— We are in the house where we live. Where else would we be? How could it be possible to be anywhere else but where we are? How silly.

— How do you know me?

— I am the person who knows you. I am the only one. And you, you know me. We create a world through that, through knowing one another. You need not worry yourself about that. We have this house that we live in, and in it we do the things we need to do to live. We cook and eat, we clean ourselves, we practice our tasks. You will have many tasks to learn and do.

— I feel, I feel very sad.

— It isn’t sadness that you feel. Sadness is a feeling of loss. There is something one wanted, and one doesn’t have it — or there is a way one wanted things to be, and things aren’t that way. That is sadness. Instead, you feel rootlessness. You have not attached yourself to the things around you. By doing so, you will find that your happiness can grow.

She led him over to a wall.

— Let us begin here. What do you see?

— Two, two…

— Pictures. They are called pictures. But you knew that. You know many words. They will return to you soon enough. Let us try — what is the top one called? What sort of picture is it?

— A painting.

— That’s right. And the bottom one?

— A picture.

— It is a picture, but what sort?

— A photograph.

— That’s right. Tell me about these pictures.

The man looked at the pictures for a very long time. After he had done so, he went and sat back down in the dining room with his head in his hands. The old woman followed him and sat beside him, with one hand on his shoulder. The rest of the day, they spoke very little, and whenever he looked up, her eyes were there, hard upon his, full of reassurance and strength.

THE NEXT DAY, she led him back to that wall.

— Tell me about these pictures, she said.

He looked at them and looked at them. Then he went into the dining room. There was a pad of paper there, and a pen. The old woman had left it there, in the middle of the table, and said nothing about it.

The man took the pad and began to draw. He drew and drew. An hour passed. He looked up. He had done a very rudimentary drawing of a farmhand feeding some chickens. With some difficulty one could perceive that that is what it was.

The old woman came over.

— Very good, she said, very good. I think…

She went into the kitchen and then came again and stood by him.

— In fact, I am sure of it. I like yours more. Sometimes sketches of things are to be preferred to paintings. I find that I often prefer artists’ sketchbooks. Such books are like this—

She drew a notebook from the wall, a loose leather fold with blank paper stitched into it. A pencil was tied to a string that hung from the side.

— You can have this one, she said. Draw in it as much as you like.

He took the book under his arm and sat intently in the chair, looking at nothing insomuch as he was looking at anything.

ONE DAY, the claimant began to write things down. He wrote things on the paper in between his drawings. The writing was not involved. He would write, This is a drawing, or, This is an idea for a drawing, or, A dog, or, The third one like this. Whenever he used the paper, he tore it out of the notebook and put it in a pile. The examiner never read any of his writing while he was awake, but in the night, she went through the pile of his drawings, very slowly and meticulously, missing nothing.

From these drawings, she learned many things. For instance, he had been in a gentlest village before. This did not surprise her in the slightest.

I wonder, she thought, which of my fellow examiners dealt with him?

Of course, she did not know all of the examiners. In fact, she knew but a tiny sliver of the total number. And if the news was to be believed, the Process of Villages was growing all the time. Soon, it would be everywhere.

She sat at the table, turning over the drawings one at a time. There was a drawing of a tower, and of a bird. These were imitations from children’s books she had shown him. In her mind’s eye she could see the originals.

But here was one she had not seen. It was a drawing of a room, and in the room there was a bed. It looked almost like a coffin. A woman lay in it, with her eyes shut and her hands folded. He had crossed out the woman repeatedly, but she could still be made out.

The old woman flipped through the sheets from the previous day. Another — the same image, with the woman crossed out. Another, and another, and another. He had been drawing all afternoon. All afternoon, he had drawn this same scene and crossed it out. There was no text with any of these.

She put the drawings back exactly where they had been and went upstairs to write her report.

— SOMETIMES I WILL TELL YOU STORIES, said the examiner. They may be full of things that you do not understand. That is not important. It isn’t important that you understand what I say. What’s important is that you behave as a human being should when someone is telling a story. So, listen properly, make noises at appropriate times, and enjoy the fact that I am speaking to you. If it is your turn to tell a story, remember that it is not very important that you are understood as long as you give the person the happiness of being told a story, and of being near you while listening to a story. Much of the speech we do is largely meaningless and is just meant to communicate and validate small emotional contracts. Are you ready?

The claimant waited to see if she was done talking and then he nodded slowly.

— We shall go for a walk and during the walk I will suddenly begin a story. Will you know how to act?