Martin Amis - Night Train

Earth, receive the strangest guest.

In the Dispersal Area I slipped away toward the yews for a dab of makeup and a cigarette. Grief brings out the taste of cigarettes, better than coffee, better than booze, better than sex. When I turned again I saw that Miriam Rockwell was approaching me. Under her black headscarf she looked like a beautiful beggar from the alleys of Casablanca or Jerusalem. Beautiful, but definitely asking, not giving. And I knew then that her daughter wasn’t done with me yet. Not by a damn sight.

We held each other—partly for the warmth, because the sun itself felt cold that day, like a ball of yellow ice, chilling the sky. With Miriam, physically, there seemed to be a little less of her to heft in your arms, but she wasn’t obviously reduced, scaled down, like Colonel Tom (standing some distance off, waiting), who looked about five feet three. Less crazy, though. Sadder, more sunken, but less crazy.

She said, “Mike, I think this is the first time I’ve seen your legs.”

I said, “Well enjoy.” We looked down at them, my legs in their black hose. And it felt okay to say, “Where did Jennifer get her legs from? Not from you, girl. You’re like me.” Jennifer’s legs belonged to some kind of racehorse. Mine are like jackhammers on castors. And Miriam’s aren’t a whole lot better.

“I used to say, let her for the rest of her life wonder where she got her figure from. Let her try to piece it together. Her figure and her face. The legs? From Rhiannon. From Tom’s mother.”

There was a silence. Which I lived intensely, with my cigarette. This was my moment of rest.

“Mike. Mike, there’s something we now know about Jennifer that we want you to know about too. You ready for this?”

“I’m ready.”

“You didn’t see the toxicology report. Tom made it disappear. Mike, Jennifer was on lithium.”

Lithium... I absorbed it—this lithium. In our city, in Drugburg here, a police quickly gets to know her pharmaceuticals. Lithium is a light metal, with commercial applications in lubricants, alloys, chemical reagents. But lithium carbonate (I think it’s a kind of salt) is a mood stabilizer. There goes our clear blue sky. Because lithium is used in the treatment of what I have heard described (with accuracy and justice) as the Mike Tyson of mental disorders: Manic depression.

I said, “You never knew she had any kind of problem like that?”

“No.”

“You talk to Trader?”

“I didn’t tell Trader. With Trader I kind of talked around it. But no. No! Jennifer? Who do you know as steady as her?”

Yeah, but people do things without people knowing. People kill, bury, divorce, marry, change sex, go nuts, give birth, without people knowing. People have triplets in the bathroom without people knowing.

“Mike, it’s funny, you know? I’m not saying it’s any better. But with this we turned some kind of corner.”

“Colonel Tom?”

“He’s back. I thought we’d lost him there. But he’s back.”

Miriam swiveled. There he stood, her husband: The heavy underlip, the scored orbits. Like he was on lithium now. His mood was stabilized. He was gazing, steadily, through the universal fog.

“See, Mike, we were looking for a why. And I guess we found one. But suddenly we don’t have a who. Who was she, Mike?”

I waited.

“Answer that, Mike. Do it. If not you, who? Henrik Overmars? Tony Silvera? Take the time. Tom’ll push you some compassionate. Do it. It has to be you, Mike.”

“Why?”

“You’re a woman.”

And I said yes. I said yes. Knowing that what I’d find wouldn’t be any kind of Hollywood ketchup or bullshit but something absolutely somber. Knowing that it would take me through my personal end-zone and all the way to the other side. Knowing too—because I think I did know, even then—that the death of Jennifer Rockwell was offering the planet a piece of new news: Something never seen before.

I said, “You’re sure you want an answer?”

“Tom wants an answer. He’s a police. And I’m his wife. It’s okay, Mike. You’re a woman. But I think you’re tough enough.”

“Yeah,” I said, and my head dropped. I’m tough enough. And getting less proud of it every hour.

She turned again toward the waiting figure of her husband, and slowly nodded. Before she moved to join him, and before I followed with my head still down, Miriam said,

“Who the hell was she, Mike?”

I think we all have this image in our heads now, and the sounds. We have these frames of film. Tom and Miriam have them. I have them. In the small interrogation room I watched them form on the other side of Trader’s eyes—these frames of film that show the death of Jennifer Rockwell.

You wouldn’t see her. You’d see the wall behind her head. Then the first detonation, and its awful flower. Then a beat, then a moan and a shudder. Then the second shot. Then a beat, a gulp, a sigh. Then the third.

You wouldn’t see her.

Suicide is the night train, speeding your way to darkness. You won’t get there so quick, not by natural means. You buy your ticket and you climb on board. That ticket costs everything you have. But it’s just a one-way. This train takes you into the night, and leaves you there. It’s the night train.

Now I feel that someone is inside of me, like an intruder, her flashlight playing. Jennifer Rockwell is inside of me, trying to reveal what I don’t want to see.

Suicide is a mind-body problem that ends violently and without any winner.

I’ve got to slow this shit down. I’ve got to slow it all down.

What I’m doing here, with my ballpoint, my tape recorder, and my PC—it’s the same as what Paulie No was doing in the ME’s office, with his clamp, his electric saw, his trayfull of knives. Only we call it the psychological autopsy.

I can do this. I am trained to do this.

Recall:

For a time, though only a short time, and only once to my face, they used to call me “Suicide Mike.” This was thought to be too offensive, even for downtown, and they soon abandoned it. Offensive not to the poor bastards found slumped in carseats in sealed garages, or half submerged in crimson bathtubs. Offensive to me: It meant I was fool enough to take any bum call. Because a suicide didn’t do a damn thing for your solve rate or your overtime. On the midnights the phone would ring and Mac or O’Boye would be pouting over the cupped receiver and saying, How about you handle this one, Mike? It’s an s.d. and I need dough for my mother’s operation. A suspicious death—not the murder he craves. For little-boy-lost here also believes that suicides are an insult to his forensic gifts. He wants a regular perpetrator. Not some schmuck who, a century ago, would have been buried at the four-corners, under a heap of rocks, with a stake through his heart. Then for a time—a short time, as I say—they’d hold out the phone and deadpan, It’s for you, Mike. It’s a suicide. And then I’d yell at them. But they weren’t wrong, maybe. Maybe it moved and compelled me more than it did them, to crouch under the bridge on the riverbank, to stand in a rowhouse stairwell while a shadow rotated slowly on the wall, and think about those who hate their own lives and choose to defy the terrible providence of God.

As part of my job I completed, as many others did, the course called “Suicide: Harsh Conclusions,” at Pete, and followed that up, again on city time, with the refresher lecture series on “Patterns of Suicide,” at CC.

I came to know the graphs and diagrams of suicide, their pie segments, their concentric circles, their color codes, their arrows, their snakes and ladders. With my Suicide Prevention tours, back in the Forty-Four, plus the hundred-some suicides I worked in the Show, I came to know not just the physical aftermaths but the basic suicide picture, ante mortem.