Martin Amis - Night Train

Yes, well. At least you’re getting a pattern here. She was medicating her own head. That’s always delusional.

How so?

It’s like mental hypochondria. Psychotropic drugs would tend to intensify that. You’d get a spiral effect.

Tell me, Doc: How surprised were you when you heard?

Surprised. Surprised. Oh, sure. And I was sick for Tom and Miriam. But at my age. In this profession. I’m not sure I’m capable... of astonishment.

And I wanted to say: You guys kill yourself a lot, don’t you. You do: Your rate is three times higher than Joe Shmoe’s. Shrinks top the list at six times higher. Then, in descending order, you got vets, pharmacists, dentists, farmers, and doctors. What’s the connection here, I wonder. Exposure to the natural processes of death, disease, and decay, maybe. Or just exposure to suffering—often dumb suffering. And availability of means. The studies talk about “role strain.” But police have role strain too. And although we’re prone to suicide, we’re nothing like these fucking kamikazes in their sky-blue smocks. Retirement time sees all of us most at risk. I think it’s to do with power. With the daily exercise of power and what happens to you when it’s taken away.

I looked up from my notes. Something shifted in Tulkinghorn’s focus. He contemplated me. I was no longer his interrogator. I was Detective Mike Hoolihan, whom he knew: A police and an alcoholic. And a patient. His washed eyes now regarded me with approval, but a cold approval, one that gave no lift to the spirit. To his or to mine.

“You’ve kept yourself in shape, Detective.”

“Yes, sir.”

“No recurrences of that nonsense.”

“None.”

“Good. You’ve seen just about everything too, haven’t you?”

“Just about. Yes, sir, I believe I have.”

When I got back home I dug out the list I’d compiled on my return from the funeral. Briskly, boldly, this list is headed, Stressors and Precipitants. But what follows now seems vague as rain:

1. Significant Other? Trader. Things he didn’t see?

2. Money?

3. Job?

4. Physical Health?

5. Mental Health? Nature of disorder: a. psychological? b. ideational/organic? c. metaphysical?

6. Deep Secret? Trauma? Childhood?

7. Other Significant Other?

Now I cross out 4. Which leaves me wondering what I mean by 5 c). And thinking about 7. Is Mr. Seven her lithium connect?

Death scenes are as delicate as orchids. Like death chemistry itself, they seem committed to the business of deterioration and decay. But my death scene has eternal youth. It still has the sash on the door. Do Not Cross. I cross.

The blood on the bedroom wall looks black now, with just the faintest undercoat of rust. At the top of the splatter, near the ceiling, the smallest drops gather like tadpoles, their tails pointing away from the site of the wound. A rectangular section of the wall has been removed by the science team, right in the middle of the base smear, where the bullet hole was. Then the downward swipe from the wedged towel.

I think of Trader, and find that I am contemplating the scene as largely an interior-decoration problem. I want to get out the mop and make a start on it myself. When he returns, will he be able to sleep in this room? How many licks of paint will he want? Surprisingly, I think I am finding a friend in Trader Faulkner. Barely a week after I tried my level best to flake him into the lethal injection, I am finding a friend in Trader Faulkner. I talked with him at the wake at the Rockwells’. It is his key I hold in my hand. He has told me where to look for everything.

Jennifer kept all her personal papers in a locked blue trunk in the living area, and I have a key for that too. But first I quickly cover the apartment from room to room, just to get a feel: Post-its on the mirror above the telephone, magnetic Scrabble pieces on the fridge door (saying milk and filters), a bathroom cabinet containing cosmetics and shampoos and a few patented medicines. In the bedroom closet her sweaters are stacked in plastic covers. Her underwear drawer is a galaxy—star-bright...

It used to be said, not so long ago, that every suicide gave Satan special pleasure. I don’t think that’s true—unless it isn’t true either that the Devil is a gentleman. If the Devil has no class at all, then okay, I agree: He gets a bang out of suicide. Because suicide is a mess. As a subject for study, suicide is perhaps uniquely incoherent. And the act itself is without shape and without form. The human project implodes, contorts inward—shameful, infantile, writhing, gesturing. It’s a mess in there.

But I look around now and what I’m seeing is settled order. Tobe and myself are both slobs, and when a pair of slobs shack up together you don’t get slob times two—you get slob squared. You get slob cubed. And this place, to me, feels like a masterpiece of system: Grooved, yet unemphatic, with nothing rigid in it. Homes of the self-slaughtered have a sullen and defeated aspect. The abandoned belongings seem to say: Weren’t we good enough for you? Weren’t we any good? But Jennifer’s apartment looks as though it is expecting its mistress to return—to fly in through the door. And against all expectation I start to be happy.

After weeks with a sour twist in my gut. The building is freestanding and even after a half hour you can feel the sun moving around it and changing the angles of all the shadows.

Trader and Jennifer, they had two bureaus, two work stations, in the living room, not ten feet apart. On his desk there is a sheet of typing paper with stuff like this written on it:

p(x) = a 0+ a 1x + a 2x 2+ a 3x 3+...

On her desk there is a sheet of typing paper with stuff like this written on it:

x = 30/10 -21m = 3 x 10 22m.

And you think, Hey. He heard her. She heard him. They talked the same language. Isn’t that what we’re all supposed to want? The peer lover, ten feet away: Silence, endeavor, common cause. Isn’t that what we’re all supposed to want? For him a woman in the room. For her a man in the room, ten feet away.

I popped the blue trunk.

It contained nine photo albums and nine ribboned bundles of letters—all of them from Trader. This is their history, illustrated and annotated. And of course ordered. Ordered especially or ordered anyway? With a premeditated suicide there is generally some kind of half-assed attempt “to put things in order”: To attempt completion. To try for completion. But I didn’t get that vibe here, and figured that the Trader “shrine” had been up and running since year one. I hauled it all out and got myself down there on the rug. Starting at the beginning: His first letter, or note, is dated June 1988:

Dear Ms. Rockwell: Forgive me, but I couldn’t help noticing you on Court Two this afternoon. What a beautiful all-court game you have—and what a toreador backhand! I wonder if sometime I could prevail upon you to give me a game, or a lesson. I was the dark-haired, bow-legged hacker on Court One.

And so it proceeds (“That was quite a set of tennis!”), with little memos about lectures and lunches. Soon the album is taking up the story: There they are on the court, individually and then together. Then complication. Then complication falling away. Then sex. Then love. Then vacations: Jennifer in a ski suit, Jennifer on the beach. Man, what a bod: At twenty, she looked like a model in an ad for those cereals that taste great but also make you shit right. Bronzed Trader at her side. Then graduation. Then cohabitation. And still the handwritten letters keep coming, the words keep coming, the words a woman wants to hear. No dashed-off faxes from Trader. Faxes, which fade in six months, like contemporary love. No scrawled reminders propped against the toaster, such as I get from Tobe. And used to get from Deniss, from Jon, from Shawn, from Duwain. GET SOME TOILET PAPER FOR CHRIST SAKE. That wouldn’t do for Jennifer. She got a fucking poem every other day.