Jesse Ball: A Cure for Suicide

She was speaking to someone else. He couldn’t hear what she was saying. The door shut, and she came up the stairs. When she saw him kneeling there, she smiled.

— Did you wake already?

— Who was that?

— Friends. They helped to bring you here. You didn’t think I could carry you all by myself?

— Can I see them?

— Not yet, she said.

— What about the other people — the people in the other houses?

— Not yet, she said.

— How will you know?

— I will know.

SHE WROTE in her report,

++

As I stated before, in the case of this claimant, the dream burden of his treatment was severe. His every sleep period is marred with nightmares. He is still in the first period, prior to Mark 1, so he remembers little to nothing of this, but it is a cause for concern. If it continues this way, I may need to directly address it. He talks in his sleep, muttering about a person who has died, and speaking with a vocabulary that he does not possess during the day. It is my hope that reprocessing is not necessary. He is mid to high functioning and could do very well as things stand but would lose much after a second injection.

++

She leaned back in her chair and her gaze ran along the wall. There was a stopped clock, an embroidered handkerchief in a glass case, and an antique map. The map showed the known world as of a time when nothing was known. How apt for the Process of Villages.

She wrote:

++

The previous case that I worked on involved a woman prone to violence and anger. None of that struggle is evident with this current claimant. It appears that his difficulty may have been entirely situational. If that is so, there is a good chance that our process will bring him to balance, as there may be no flaw whatsoever in his psyche.

++

— GARDENER IS THERE! He’s there!

She came to the window where the claimant was sitting.

— Is it the same one — or a different one?

— This one is wearing…

— Glasses.

— The other didn’t have them.

— Is that a good way to tell them apart? she asked.

— It is one way.

— What if I were to wear glasses?

She took a pair out of a drawer and put them on.

— Would I be a different person?

She did look like a different person with glasses on, but he didn’t want to say that, so he said nothing.

— It is usually safe to assume that a person is different if their physical characteristics are different, said the examiner. But even then sometimes people change — by accident or on purpose — and the same person can look different. Likewise, two people can look very alike.

— Or be exactly the same, he said.

— What do you mean?

— Twins are alike. They are the same.

— But even if the bodies are the same, the minds inside are different — their experiences are different. They are different people.

— Even if they can’t be told apart?

— Even then.

— I knew someone, I think, who was a twin.

She looked at him very seriously and said nothing.

— She had a twin, but the twin died.

— How do you know this? asked the examiner.

— I remember it.

— But not from life, she said. You remember it from a dream. When you sleep at night, your mind wreathes images and scenes, sounds, speech, tactile constellations — anything that is sensory — into dreams. One feels that one has lived these things, of course one does. But dreams are imagined. They are a work of the imagination.

— What is the imagination for?

— It is a tool for navigating life’s random presentation of phenomena. It enables us to guess.

— But I am sure that I knew her.

— Know her you did, but it was in a dream. You may dream of her again. That is the world where you can meet such a person. The actual world is different. For you, it is this house, and the street beyond. It is the lake at the center of the village, and the gazebo in the lake. It is the meal we take together at midday, and again at nightfall.

She sat for a moment quietly.

— Do you remember the book that I was reading to you from?

— About the poacher and his dog?

— Yes. You remember how real it seemed? Well, it is not real. It just seems to be real. And that is just a toy of words on a page — not anything close to the vibrant power of the mind’s complete summoning that you find in the night. Is it any wonder that you believe it to be real? That you confuse memory and sleep’s figment?

He shook his head.

She took off the glasses, and put them in the drawer.

— I still feel that you are different with glasses, he said.

She laughed.

— People do look quite different with glasses, I suppose. I suppose that must be true.

— Will you play for me on the piano? he asked.

She went to the piano and opened it.

— I can know that it is you because you play for me on the piano, he said. Someone else wouldn’t do that.

— So, she said — you believe an individual’s function and service are identical to their person?

She began to play.

He looked out the window again. It was open, and the air was moving now and then, sometimes in, sometimes out. Or, it must move out whenever it moves in. It couldn’t just move in, or it would all end up inside. But, he supposed, that wasn’t entirely impossible. After all, he was completely inside.

He put his arm out the window and felt the air on it.

Below, the neatly trimmed yard lay flat on its side. The street unrolled from left to right, and beyond the houses, other streets could be seen by the white chalk of their surface. The tops of houses could be seen downhill, the glint of light off the lake in the distance. In the long fields of the distance, and in the canopies of the trees, in waves at their edges, he felt a coy energy. It was as though the edges of things were where the greater part might be hidden — where he could find more.

But he need not go even so far as beyond the room to find more — for just then, the sound of the examiner’s playing was moving him. He sat still in the window, but he could feel himself moving. It was a peculiar sensation, to have things called up out of one’s depths. A person can travel when they hear music, just as much as by walking.

He said it to himself and it sounded good.

— A person can travel when they hear music, just as much as by walking.

The examiner looked up. She stopped playing.

— Some can. It is a matter of inner faculty.

— I don’t know…

— Can you feel what you think I am feeling when I play? Can you watch me and imagine how I am feeling? There are people who can. Some people go beyond that, and imagine that they can feel what inanimate objects feel, or what animals feel, or even attribute feelings to a landscape, or a distant house. When you go on a journey of empathy such as that, it rouses sensations that have long sat deep within. Thus you feel as you do now. It is even possible, she continued, to empathize with a person you hope to be, or a person you have been, long ago in a city or a town you may never see again.

— A city?

— We live in a village. It is a place…

— A place of houses.

— That’s right. A city is like that, but larger. The houses are stacked upon each other, so that they rise up into the sky like mountains, only much steeper. The air is full of them — houses wherever you look. In some places you can’t see the sky at all unless you look straight up. Millions of people — a hundred times a hundred times a hundred — wander the streets in things called crowds, large groups of people who need have no common purpose.