Jesse Ball: A Cure for Suicide

Yes, she would continue, we shall go on a walk to the lake, and perhaps this time we will walk around it to the small wood at the back. There we will find the trees that we like. Do you remember them? Do you remember that I like the thin birch that stands by the stream, and that you prefer the huge maple with the roots that block the path? Do you remember when you first saw it, and you ran to it? We shall go there tomorrow, and spend as much time as we want to sitting with those trees, in that quiet place. And when we have done that, we shall come home, walking fast or slow, and we shall…

And in this way she would go through the day and give him a sense that there was something to look forward to, and nothing to fear.

ON THE ELEVENTH DAY, the examiner brought a sheet of paper to the dining room table. She asked the claimant to sit opposite her. In her hand, she had also a thick object made of paper.

— This, she said, is a book. It is one of our ways of codifying and keeping human knowledge. When it cannot be kept in a person’s head, this is one method of keeping it safe. It is a good way of moving ideas from one head to another, as it only requires one person’s time to do it, and not two.

She opened the book and showed him the letters. She wrote them out on the paper.

— I think, he said. I think I can do it.

— Can you, she said.

He took the pen and wrote on the paper:

A room and a table and a pen. I am writing this.

He wrote it perfectly. The examiner took a deep breath.

— Very good, she said. That means that I will not need to teach you how to write. What a good thing. Our use of writing will be the following: I want you to take some time in the morning to write down the dreams that you can remember from the night before.

His face became downcast.

— I know that you have dreams, she said. I have watched you toss and turn. You even cry out now and then. Let us attend to them, and perhaps we can settle your sleep.

— I will try.

— It is difficult for a person to write down dreams when anyone is nearby, so I am going to go out on the porch and read for a little while. You can come and join me when you are done.

She placed a notebook on the table.

— You can write your dreams into this. It is nicer than the loose sheets.

— Do you have any questions about writing?

— How is it that I can remember to write — but you had to show me how to button a shirt?

— Time is passing, she said. You are coming back into yourself. Perhaps other good things, other helpful things will appear.

— Is writing the same as thinking? he asked. Maybe that’s why I didn’t forget it.

— It is not the same, although it can almost be. We shall see what your writing is like. I am eager to know. Some trace the origin of writing to the origins of granaries, thousands of years ago. Before that, man wandered as a hunter, but once he began to till the land, there was more food than could be eaten in a day. What was there to do but put it in a building and save it? Then, one suddenly feels the need to write down how much grain has been put in the building. And, that’s when writing begins — or so some say. The other thing, she confided, that starts with granaries, is the keeping of cats. They came to the granaries to hunt mice and rats, and they have stayed ever since. Cats and writing, perhaps they share a little of the same nature, then? That is a joke, she said.

The examiner left the room. Her footsteps crossed the hall, paused at the door, and sounded on the porch.

ON THE FIFTEENTH DAY, she sat at the writing desk, making her report. The noise of the claimant’s breathing could be heard through the open door. A window was before her, and through it she could see clouds and a sky surrounding them, and beyond it, a moon that was hardly a sliver. Maybe there wasn’t even a moon there to be seen.

++

The claimant’s memories intrude at an alarming rate. The cause is clearly his dream recollection. I have chosen a course of reintegration, to begin tomorrow. He has completely regained his written language, and writes with great composure.

A sample of his dream records:

_ _

I see the face of a woman as she lies in a bed. I am sometimes near enough that her face is all I can see, as though she were leaning over me. But it is I that am leaning over her. At other times, I feel I am far away and I can see the bed, the room, and her — all of them as small as objects on a table, and as still. I am sure that she is dead.

When I see her, I feel that she is surrounded by images, and although I can see her, I cannot see the images that blur her face. Somehow I feel that they are images of our happiness — that we were happy and knew one another. I feel that these things are hidden from me, and that she has carried them into death and I can never know them again.

And then I am flying through a long tunnel in the darkness and there are stars all about me, and finally I realize that I am just water — I am just the surface of a pond. I ripple and when I ripple, I sail through darkness until the ripples settle and I can see again. And when I see, what I see is the sky above and it is full of pinpricks of light.

When I woke up this morning, I had just been sitting in a station where there were huge machines to carry people. I was waiting for someone, and I was holding a paper bag full of presents. I wore a long coat — it was cold — and a hat and gloves. A child was crying or blowing its nose on the bench beside me. I felt someone was coming to meet me. And always someone comes up from behind and calls to me, a man. I see him, but I don’t recognize him, and he goes away, not as in life, but back the way he came, backward, fluttering backward, and all the trains leave the station the same way, and even the child is gone, there’s just a bench and a handkerchief, and I am the one crying.

_ _

Troubling, to say the least.

The course of his recovery is peculiar. We are already on difficult ground. He has begun to insist that he remembers this woman, and he asks me incessantly to explain details of his dreams — which would lend him a larger view onto the life he led. All the same, I favor transparency, where it is possible. Perhaps it is not possible here.

++

THE EXAMINER sat the claimant down at the dining room table one afternoon.

— Do you remember, she said, how I told you last week that there was a thing called writing, how I explained it to you, and showed you about it, how we practiced thinking about it, and imagining doing it, and how it could be used to record dreams?

The claimant looked at her with a bit of confusion.

— You remember how I told you several of my dreams? How I wrote them down and showed them to you? And I told you, if you wanted to, you could try to dream them yourself? And you have been trying, all this last week?

She set on the table several sheets of paper — in her handwriting, the dreams she had written out for him.

— I suppose, said the claimant, I suppose I do. It is hard to remember. I feel like I have been dreaming.

— You have been dreaming, said the examiner, you have been, and, Anders, you have been dreaming the dreams that I told you to! You have been so very successful. Now it is time, for the very first time, for you to write yourself.

She brought out a pencil and a leather notebook and set them before him.

— Please write down in this the dreams I have been sharing with you — the ones you managed to also have. And write down any you have that branch off of those — those are important, too.