Jesse Ball - A Cure for Suicide

— I don’t like it. I felt very…

— Alone?

— Yes, alone.

— Maybe, she said. It would be easier for you if it were actually someone else.

— I think so, he said.

— There is someone over there, down the way a bit. Why don’t you walk down there and speak to them.

HE WALKED down the road a bit. Sure enough, up ahead, there was a little house, a sort of tollhouse, with a long plank that lowered to block the road.

A man appeared as he approached.

— Papers, said the man.

— Papers?

— I need to see them. I need your papers, said the man.

— I don’t, I don’t have any, said Anders.

The man started for the tollhouse, as if to take some action, and right then, the examiner came up from behind.

— It’s all right, she said. He’s with me.

The toll minder nodded, and sat down on the bench where he had been. To him it was suddenly as though they were not there.

The examiner put her arm around the claimant.

— Let’s go back, she said. You did just fine.

— Why did he ignore us like that? the claimant asked.

— Oh, that’s what people do. He was just returning to the little world he inhabits when no one’s around. At certain conversational junctures it’s perfectly fine to do that. What you need to do is discover where such junctures lie.

SHE WAS WRITING her report and sipping a glass of sherry. She had been leafing through a score of Stravinsky, and it leaned on the back of the writing desk, its fine black lines radiating outward as if to cover the room.

++

The claimant has recovered most general function. He can wash himself, dress himself, eat, drink, cook, and govern his natural hours, sleeping at regular times. He has a tendency to drift, and fall into confusion, and he cannot yet discriminate between what is real and what is not.

The integration appears to be working. He speaks to me of his memories as I have invoked them — that is, as my memories which I have seeded into his dreams. This provides him with a level of remove that may permit him some grace.

All the same, the nightmares continue unabated. Here is the text of the last two:

_ _

Where the buses all end up, I have gone there, somehow I’ve ended up there. The bus drivers all leave their buses wherever they can. It is a large yard in a sort of depression, surrounded by trees. Perhaps it was once a sump. It is enormous, and the buses are everywhere. Many of them are out of service, or have been forever. They don’t even have wheels. The bus drivers get out of their buses one by one as they arrive, I didn’t see this, but I know it, they get out and they walk to a wall at the back of the yard and they all stand facing the wall with their noses nearly touching it. There are hundreds of them. It is how they sleep. I am one of the bus drivers. I pull my bus into the yard and stop it wherever I like. I get out. I walk slowly across the yard, as slowly as I like, and when I reach the wall, there is a place there, an empty spot, and I ease myself into it. I am so near the wall, I can feel the cold radiating from the stone. I am basking in that cold. I feel myself falling back into sleep.

*

I am driving again, this time I am driving a car, an open car, in the countryside. There is someone beside me in the car, but I cannot turn my head to look at her. We are going tremendously fast, and the road is curved. We are moving back and forth on the road, the wind is pushing us, and it requires all of my skill just to continue. I want to turn my head and look at her, but I cannot. The light is going out of the countryside that I am in. The whole thing is going dim; the sun is not seeing — it’s more that, someone is closing her eyes, and the light will soon be gone. Just as the light is gone, I turn my head to look and I see her, there, she flashes briefly in the dimness, and the car spills off the road, rolling and rolling and rolling and my body is racked with pain.

_ _

Yesterday, he woke confused; he had forgotten our speech about his dreams. He told me that he wanted to go back to where he had been. He named the city. He asked me if I knew the way. I told him that I did know the way. He should listen to me and follow my instructions. I led him through a breathing exercise and he fell back into sleep and slept through the morning. When he woke the second time, he remembered nothing…

++

She paused in her writing. The claimant was stirring in the next room.

— I’M HERE, she said.

— Rana, he said. Rana.

— There is no Rana.

— Rana. Where are you?

The claimant sat up in bed. His face was pallid. The window was wide open and the room was full of the night air. There was so much of it, it rolled back and forth over them. The examiner shut the window, and then they were there in the room again.

— I’m here, she said.

The claimant began to cry.

— In the last week, I didn’t know, he said. I didn’t know. She was sick and she hid it from me. I promise you, if I had known, I would have, I would have…

— Go back to sleep, said the examiner.

She knelt by him on the bed and eased him down into a sleeping position. He reached for her, and clutched at her arm, pulling her to him. She lay for a second against him, and his breathing, at first ragged, grew regular. She came out from under his hand, and left the room.

THE EXAMINER sat long into the night thinking. She did not want to make this decision. She would delay it as long as possible. If he were to be processed again…it pained her to think of it. She remembered her first work, with a claimant who had been processed three times. He could hardly speak. She had taught him to take care of himself, and had helped him to learn a simple vocation.

It wasn’t that the process made the brain function less well. It only removed a capacity for action. Each time, a person became less likely to follow an intuition, or take up an idea or a challenge. Those who lost all or nearly all of this impulsiveness, as it was called, a reuse of the word, became the basic workers, the deed-doers in the gentle villages. It was they whom one saw through windows, people who would never go out of themselves, or leave a house unbidden, it was they who stood in simple uniforms, gardening or sweeping in the streets. They were a staple of the gentle villages, a staple, a tool, a mechanism, and its result.

Others, who could be helped with one processing — went on to do what they liked. Such a person could return to regular life, or stay within the system. Some, as she had told the claimant, even became examiners. They never seemed to be bothered by learning the methods — never seemed to guess that those same methods might have been employed to alter their own minds. It is only natural, supposed the examiner. In an extreme case, I suppose, I might have even been…

She shuddered.

It was the nineteenth day. There was scarcely any time left. When the sun rose, the examiner was still sitting where she had been. Her eyes were open, and focused on some point on the wallpaper. But which point it was, even she couldn’t say. Light had stood in the sky for an hour or two when she heard something in the next room, a sort of battering, a crash, and a low moan.

— ANDERS!

The bedroom and all its elements were overturned.

He must have lifted the bedframe up and knocked it over. Was he asleep when he did it? The dresser was on its side. The mattress was over him, bent practically in half. He was shaking, curled in the corner under the mattress. She pulled it off of him.