Jesse Ball - A Cure for Suicide

The mill was largely broken down. We stopped by the road and crossed a field of thistle and weed to reach it. As I did, I paused at the threshold, but she plunged in. From room to collapsed room, she went, eager, possessed with the power of the adventure. I went after, looking for her in bedraggled and shattered chambers. Though in many places, an old mill like this would have become the site of drinking, of vandalism, it was here so far from anywhere that it was only what it had been — a mill that someone had walked away from, or died in, that time had settled upon with all its weight. The glass in the windows was old, and thicker at the bottom. The mill wheel had fallen off, and part of it could be seen slumped down into the water. We are the wreck of what we have been, and the place of our own future demise, I thought. Immediately, I heard her laughter through a space in the walls, and I felt — lightness. What a fool I was to think such sentiments. Here I was in a derelict mill and I had humanized the structure in the most paltry way. My mind was so limited, I thought. Where I, standing in the mill, felt only grief at my own impending death, a death that was half a century off, so distant it could not even be conceived, she, on the other hand, felt buoyed. Standing in the mill, she felt the delight that a world could be, and that in it, a mill could be, and that in order they should fall this way — world, mill, and then her standing in a mill, with myself a room distant. I went to where I thought she had been, and it seemed I was mistaken. She was not there but on the roof, actually overhead. She had been watching me. I climbed up with her, and we sat on the mill, and wherever we went within it, it broke more, and we left it worse than when we had come. I said that to her, and she said, it has had some friends, now, though, or at the very least acquaintances. Without us, it would simply have sat this evening watching the road. Then she laughed again, it is almost a koan, what is the use of an old broken grist mill. We were quiet for a while. I could see she had suddenly been overwhelmed. She was dizzy, and sat all the way to the ground, so I told the interlocutor. I should say she fell, but it was slower than that. Are you all right? We should go back, now, she told me. Suddenly, I can hardly stand. It is night already. A moment ago, it was plain day, and now, night. It isn’t as dark as that, I said. Come on. We went back across the field, and though she had skipped to the mill in and out of the high grasses, she now labored as though under a yoke. I lifted her into the car and got in beside her. She regained some strength there, spread out in the car where we had had so many fine times. I once thought, she told me, that I would be a diver. My aunt went on a world travel at age sixteen, my mother’s sister, and in Mexico, she leapt from a cliff and died. She was in a group with others — nine other sixteen-year-olds, all from my mother’s town. They all jumped; the guide jumped. It was deemed safe. Every one of them survived but her. She was found in the water with her neck broken. I was young when my father told me this story, so Rana said. I had been looking at old pictures, and I found one of her, there, actually on the cliff, in a bathing suit. The photograph was taken moments before. It was found in the camera of one of the other children. It seemed to me from the picture that she would be a wondrous diver. The other children were gangly or squat, ill proportioned. She was a sort of swan, just perfect — the sweep of her at sixteen was marvelous. I felt, seeing this picture, that she possessed the utterness of this word, diver. Yet, my father said to me, so Rana told me, that in jumping off that cliff, she had ended her life. I wanted to be a diver, too. I told him that. I stood there, a child, looking at a picture of my father’s sister-in-law, his own cousin, who had died, the sadness of which he had borne for decades, and in the moment of his relating to me the tragedy of her death, I said, I want to be a diver, too. That is how I was as a child. I want you to know that, Rana told me, so I said to the interlocutor. She sat there, stunningly beautiful, in this beat-up old car. We were parked there in the mountains, where a mill had been built by a river, where the river had mostly gone dry and the mill had broken down completely. This place where people had lived had become completely overgrown. She and I, this wonderful girl, Rana, and I, had adventured there, and taxed her, taxed her to her utmost, and now she, terribly, vengefully beautiful, sat with her knees to her chest in the car, telling me of her childhood idols, and her childhood impudence. I think, I told her, that you would have made a spectacular diver.

I woke up on the sixth day. The night before, we had talked of whether we would go back soon, whether we would make the travel. I had asked her about it, and she had had little to say — only, as you like. I am not ready yet, she might have said. When I am a little stronger, or something like it. I had misgivings, I think. I believe, I told the interlocutor, that as I fell asleep, I had misgivings about staying there any longer. I had suddenly come to believe that she was not affected by the altitude at all, that she, as a mountain-person, would never have been affected by it. Just as I was dropping off to sleep, I told him, my thoughts led me to believe that she was not affected by the altitude, but was instead very sick, that she had been all along — the whole time I’d known her, and that I somehow hadn’t seen it. But, it is easy to think that now — to believe I had thought that, when, in fact, it is quite possible that I didn’t think it at all, but rather, as we so often are, I was on the edge of thinking it, and never came wholly into the thought. However it was, however it might have been, I woke that morning in a bed overlooking the stream as it fell through a sort of gorge, the bed that she had chosen for us to sleep in, and I turned over and tugged at her. I spoke to her. This terrible and inconceivable thing had suddenly come to be completely and unutterably true: I found upon waking, that she had died in the night, at some point in the night, and I had kept on sleeping, knowing nothing.

That it could have happened — this dreadful thing, that I could have kept on sleeping while she was dying, and not noticed, not woken up, I felt a momentary hope in it. It couldn’t be true, and if it wasn’t true, then maybe she was still alive. But she was not alive. I thought of the condition of our night’s sleep and her passing. Maybe she had even tried to wake me. She must have. She who was so perceptive, it could be, it could have been that she had noticed her own death approaching and that she had tried to wake me to speak some final thing into my ear, and that I, instead of waking, instead of acceding to her very last wish, had kept on sleeping, dumbly, vacantly, sleeping on, so I told the interlocutor. He handed me another cloth, and when he did so, our hands touched and he pressed my arm with his other hand. She did not believe, I thought at the time, I told him, that she was going to die. But now, I believe, I said to the interlocutor, that she knew all along, and that she didn’t tell me in order to give us the maximum possible time of happiness. If it could be that our last days were spent weeping and carrying on — they would simply have been a blur. They would have bled into one another. She was stronger than that, and her strength manifested in this way: she would not tell me, did not tell me, and we instead spent the time planning a life that we could never live. Where she was in the bed, curled against me, one leg actually wrapped around a leg of mine — it hurt my heart to feel and see it. It was clear that while dying she had clung to me, had pushed as close as physically possible. And all this while I slept, insensible. I lay there for hours, not moving, actually afraid to move at all, and I felt that I wished I could not move. But, eventually I rose. I straightened her out, and laid her hands across her body. I shut her eyes, and pulled a blanket partway up over her legs. Then, I felt strange about it, and pulled the blanket down. I looked at her, there in her nightgown, and I cried and didn’t know what to do. So, I dressed her in some of her clothes, what clothes I could fit over her, and then I went to the telephone and called her parents. Although I did not want to, I did it, I told the interlocutor. I called her parents, and her mother answered the phone. She recognized me, and the first thing she said, in a terrible voice, was, where are you. I said, I need to tell you something, and she said, you don’t tell me anything. Where are you, that’s all. I told her where I was, and she hung up. That same day, they must have driven for fourteen hours straight, her parents arrived with others, and they took her away. They took me back to the city, and actually dropped me off at the outskirts. They did not want to take me into the city. There was a feeling, I came to understand, that I was to blame. No one said, she would have lived longer, but I knew that they felt, every last one, that I did not deserve to have her last week to myself. They had never understood why she had taken up with me. They understood it completely, why she had been able to be so free with me — that my not knowing about her death was the whole of it. But why it should have been me, it was actually unfathomable. I was special merely because of my ignorance. That was what she had seen in me, so they thought. Her father said to me, get out of the car, please, and pulled up at the curb. I got out, and the car sped away. It had stopped for the briefest moment, and then it sped away again. I was deep in my thoughts, in the backseat of the car, and then I was watching as the car drove off. In the car, as we drove in the car, I noticed that her parents spoke with the mountain accent. It was apparent to me as I heard them speaking, as it had not been apparent to me at our previous meetings. We had been driving, all the way back, straight, fourteen hours again, with her body in the car, laid out in a coffin. The car had been turned into a sort of impromptu hearse, so I told the interlocutor, and I listened to them speak, and they said things pertaining to her treatment. They grieved in a very plain way with one another, there in the car, in my hearing. My presence was a difficulty for them, and they overcame it by simply believing that I was less than nothing. Always, one would begin to say things, to make regrets about her treatment, or the decisions that they had made in recent months, and then the other one, whichever one had not spoken, would cut in and say, enough of that. It is useless. And then twenty minutes or an hour would pass, and the very one, the same one who had said that it was useless to speak so, would begin to say again, but I think we could have sent her to this hospice, or perhaps that doctor could have done more…and the first one would interrupt, saying, it is useless. There is no use to speaking like that. And all the while I felt that, although I was in the car, although she was in the back of the car that I was traveling in and we were riding along mountain roads back toward the city, I still felt, surely and completely, that I was lying in the bed in the house with her wrapped about me. I felt that more than anything I wanted that immediate feeling to overwhelm me: the sense that she was totally and endlessly wrapped about me. And simultaneous to that, I could see, as if from above, the room in which I had set her, and the place where she lay, with her hands folded, and her face looking up at the ceiling, straight up, through the ceiling. I was standing on the side of the street, some street I had never been on, at the outskirts of the city, and I sat down. I didn’t even go to the curb, I just sat in the street. I was wearied, completely wearied.