Martin Amis - Night Train

And Jennifer doesn’t belong here. She doesn’t belong.

I have my folders out on the couch, this Sunday morning. Going through my notes to see what I got:

· In all cultures, risk of suicide increases with age. But not steadily. The diagonal graph-line seems to have a flattish middle section, like a flight of stairs with a landing. Statistically (for what stats are worth around here), if you make it into your twenties, you’re on level ground until the risk bump of the midlife. Jennifer was twenty-eight.

· About 50 percent of suicides have tried before. They are parasuicides or pseudosuicides. About 75 percent give warning. About 90 percent have histories of egression—histories of escape. Jennifer hadn’t tried before. So far as I know, she did not give warning. All her life she saw things through.

· Suicide is very, very means-dependent. Take the means away (toxic domestic gas, for instance) and the rate plummets. Jennifer didn’t need gas. Like many another American, she owned a gun. These are my notes. What about their notes, and what percentage leave them? Some studies say 70 percent, others say 30. Suicide notes, it is assumed, are often spirited away by the decedent’s loved ones. Suicides, as we have seen, are often camouflaged—smudged, snowed. Axiom: Suicides generate false data. Jennifer, apparently, did not leave a suicide note. But I know she wrote one. I just feel this.

It may run in families but it’s not inherited. It is a pattern, or a configuration. It’s not a predisposition. If your mother kills herself, it won’t help, and it opens a door...

Here are some other do’s and don’ts. Or don’ts, anyway:

Don’t work around death. Don’t work around pharmaceuticals.

Don’t be an immigrant. Don’t be a German, just off the boat.

Don’t be Romanian. Don’t be Japanese.

Don’t live where the sun doesn’t shine.

Don’t be an adolescent homosexual: One in three will attempt.

Don’t be a nonagenarian Los Angelean.

Don’t be an alcoholic. It’s suicide on the installment plan, anyway.

Don’t be a schizophrenic. Disobey those voices in your head.

Don’t be depressed. Lighten up.

Don’t be Jennifer Rockwell.

And don’t be a man. Don’t be a man, whatever you do. Tony Silvera was, of course, talking through his ass when he said that suicide was “a babe thing.” To the contrary, suicide is a dude thing. Attempting is a woman thing: They’re more than twice as likely to do that. Completing is a man thing: They’re more than twice as likely to do that. There’s only one day in the year when it’s safer to be male. Mother’s Day.

Mother’s Day is the day for felo de se. How come? I wonder. Is it the all-you-can-eat brunch at the Quality Inn? No. The suicides are the women who skipped the lunch. They’re the women who skipped the kids.

Don’t be Jennifer Rockwell.

The question is: But why not?

The first person I’m going to be wanting to talk to is Hi Tulkinghorn—Jennifer’s physician. Over the years I’ve come across this old party a bunch of times at the Rockwells’ (barbecues, cocktails on Christmas Eve). And, recall, Colonel Tom had him in to look me over, when I was drying out there: DT-ing for a week in one of the children’s bedrooms on the first floor. Which I don’t remember a whole lot about. Small, bald, clean-eyed, Tulkinghorn’s the kind of elderly medic who, over time, seems to direct more and more of his doctoring know-how inward—to keep his own little show on the road. The other kind of elderly medic is a drunk. Or he’s drying out. When I was drying out, Jennifer used to come into the room in the evenings. She’d sit in the corner and read to me. She’d feel my brow and fetch me water.

Now. I had called Tulkinghorn’s office on March eighth, almost two weeks ago. And how about this. The old prick was on a poker cruise in the Caribbean. So I had his secretary page him and he came squawking in from The Straight Flush. Told him the news and said I was following up on it. He said to make an appointment. I called his office again, and got talking. It turned out that it isn’t Tulkinghorn who plays poker. It’s his wife. He gets nice and tan on a lounger—while she’s crouching at a table in the saloon, blowing the second home on her two pair.

Hi Tulkinghorn works out of a gothic apartment block near Alton Park, over in the Thirty-Seven. I sat there in the narrow corridor, like a patient, with an ear-sufferer on one side of me and a throat-sufferer on the other. The parched secretary sat in her cubbyhole pushing paper around and answering the phone: “Doctor’s office?” Younger guys in smocks, like interns, sloped in and out with clipboards and vials. Walls of folders and binders, floor to ceiling: What? Fading biopsy reports. Dust-coated urinalyses. Mr. Ear and Mr. Throat both groaned raggedly when the woman nodded me through. I passed from the corridor shadows into the Germanic tang of Tulkinghorn’s surgery and the usual smell of mouthwash.

I’d like to be able to say that Hi’s tan made him look like death warmed up. But he just twinkled away, self-sufficiently enough, there behind his desk. Now, this I do remember. When I was hallucinating, in the little room at Colonel Tom’s, visited by visitors, some of them real, some of them not, and wondering how the hell I was going to get through the next half hour, I’d sometimes think: I know. I’ll fuck one of these ghosts. That’ll kill some time. But I didn’t want to fuck Hi Tulkinghorn. He has too much death knowledge, soberly absorbed, in his pale blue eyes. Careful here. Don’t say Hi.

“Doctor.”

“Detective. Take a seat.”

“How was the cruise? Your wife make money?”

“She broke about even. I’m sorry I missed the funeral. I tried to get a flight from Port of Spain. I’ve talked with Colonel and Mrs. Rockwell. I’ll be doing what I can there.”

“Then you know why I’m here.”

We paused. I opened my notebook and looked down at the page. I was suddenly very impressed by my jottings of the night before. Which said: Nature of the disorder: Reactive/non-reactive? Affective/ideational? Psychological/organic? From within or without? I began:

Dr. Tulkinghorn, what kind of patient was Jennifer Rockwell?

... She—she wasn’t.

Excuse me? What was her medical history?

She didn’t have one.

I don’t follow.

As far as I’m aware she never had a day’s illness in her life. Except of course in infancy. Her checkups were a joke.

When was the last time you saw her?

Saw her here? About a year ago.

Was she under the care of anybody else?

I’m not sure I understand. She had a dentist, and a gynecologist, a Dr. Arlington. She’s a friend of mine. Same story there. As a specimen Jennifer was close to phenomenal.

Then why was she on lithium, Doctor?

Lithium? She was not on lithium, Detective.

See this? This is Toxicology. She have a psychiatrist?

Certainly not. I’d have been notified—you know that.

He took the Xeroxed sheet from my hand and surveyed it with indignation. With quiet indignation. I knew what he was thinking. Already, he was thinking: If she didn’t get it from a professional, then where did she get it? The next thought being: You can get anything in this city—easy. Yeah, tell me about it. And not from a hoody on a corner but from a smiling piece of shit in a labcoat. The names of the drugs out there can run on for twenty-five syllables... A silence followed. A silence of the kind that must be pretty frequent, in his line of work. In delivery rooms, over test results, in the reflected light of X-ray screens. And then Dr. Tulkinghorn gave up on Jennifer. With the slightest flex of his shoulders, he let Jennifer Rockwell go.