Chris Bohjalian - Secrets of Eden

I would contemplate who might find my body, and at first I would worry how it would affect them, but soon I was beyond caring. When you are as far down that path toward self-destruction as I was, you grow oblivious: not selfish, precisely, but insensible. Still, I decided finally that the best thing I could do was to choose a method that would make it likely that I was found by someone who did not know me well (if at all) and that my body would not be left in a condition that might leave that person with memories it would be hard to expunge. Consequently, I never seriously contemplated using a gun.

And so the night before the first day of exams, while everyone was hunkering down in dorm rooms or the various libraries scattered across the campus, I dropped the small bottle of my roommate’s sleeping pills into the dance bag that doubled as my book bag and slipped unnoticed into the basement of our dorm. I also packed a water bottle and some antihistamine tablets I had gotten from the infirmary to ensure that I wouldn’t vomit back up the great handfuls of sleeping pills I was planning to ingest. I had caught a glimpse of myself in the bedroom mirror on my way out the door, and I was struck by how drawn my face seemed, even by the standards of that miserable autumn, and how my hair looked a bit like a crazy woman’s: I hadn’t washed it in four or five days-hygiene falls by the wayside when you’re depressed-and it was hanging in strands that were long and oily and flat.

The dormitory was a Georgian monolith from the turn of the century, and the basement was a maze of thin corridors created by the rows of empty trunks and stacked cardboard boxes that belonged to the eighty of us who lived on the four floors above. There was a corner with our bicycles and a few pieces of decrepit furniture that not even a college student would use. I wanted no one to know I was in the basement, and so I navigated the stairs and the labyrinthine chaos on the cement floor by flashlight. I had pulled the door shut behind me. What I found most interesting as I searched for my own trunk was how the basement, which previously had been a source of terror-the abode of spiders and mice and demented men who lurked in the shadows-seemed now to be merely a cold room jam-packed with the detritus of young adults. It wasn’t frightening at all.

And, soon enough, I found my trunk. It was wedged vertically between another first-year student’s chest and some supermarket cartons still filled with sheets. The trunk smelled a little mustier than when I had arrived back in late August, but otherwise it was downright comforting to find it. I dragged it to the corner of the basement nearest the massive closet with the dorm boilers, the warmest section of the room, and then took some of the sheets from one of those boxes. The chest was big, but I was still far too lanky to fit inside it, even curled up pathetically in the fetal position. But I could make myself comfortable if I viewed the trunk as a tub and dangled my legs over the edge and used those sheets as a pillow and a mattress. That was my plan. Reclining in the dark in the trunk of a dorm basement, I was going to find that great undiscovered country. I thought-and I know now this isn’t necessarily the case-that overdosing on sleeping pills would be a painless way to die. I would doze off and either never wake or wake to a reality I had never imagined.

I turned off the flashlight, but there were basement windows facing the road, and the streetlights allowed me to see reasonably well once my eyes had adjusted to the room.

For perhaps five or ten minutes, I procrastinated. I counted the sleeping pills (there were plenty), I lined them up like candy Pez in my palm or along the upside-down top of the trunk. I eyed the antihistamine tablets and took small sips from my water bottle, but only very small sips because I wanted to make sure that I had plenty remaining to wash down the pills. I listened to the sounds of my dormmates and fellow students, occasionally running along the corridors and stairs above me; I heard their laughter and bellowed greetings. I heard rock music from somewhere in the building, but I couldn’t pinpoint the source. Generally, however, the campus was quieter than on most nights, because everyone was uncharacteristically focused. And as I listened, I cried. These were not sobs and wails but a steady stream of sniffles and tears as I wondered who the unlucky soul would be who would find me (an inevitability that did cause me to hesitate, but only briefly, and in the end was not the reason I am alive today), and I thought again of what a pathetic and tragic footnote to the world the whole Laurent family was. I was awash in self-loathing and self-pity and no small amount of anger toward my father (a murderer) and my mother (a victim) and even poor, troubled Amanda (like me, a deserter, a person who it seemed was also planning to escape this world soon enough). I clutched perhaps a half dozen pills in each of my hands, and slowly I lost myself in a memory of a moment when I had been a little girl in, I believed, the second grade. My mother was braiding my hair, which meant this was the one afternoon each week when I wouldn’t have had dance, because it was required that my hair was up when I was at the studio-we were not permitted to allow it to swing free in a braid. I was sitting at the kitchen table with a small ramekin of her homemade chocolate pudding (what she called with great affectation her pot de crème ), and I was aglow with serenity and composure. Say what you will about aggressive dance training, it does wonders for a little girl’s poise. The sun was cascading in through the western window, brightening the whole room, and I was very, very content.

Still, it only made the fact that now I was crying in a trunk I was imagining as my coffin all the more pathetic-and me all the more likely to finally go through with my suicide. Really, I was not hoping to be discovered and saved. And so I brought my right hand to my mouth, wondering how many of the pills I could swallow at once. Two? Three? Perhaps even four? And it was as I looked down at my hand that I saw my hair had fallen across my breasts-in a braid. An absolutely perfect, elegant, tangle-free French braid. I dropped the pills and patted the crown of my head to be sure. Then I brought the braid to my face and savored the aroma of the rose-scented shampoo my mother had used on my hair when I’d been a little girl.

I reached for the flashlight so I could be sure of what I was seeing. Indeed, I wasn’t making this up or seeing something that wasn’t there in the gloaming light of the basement. My hair was clean and had been arranged in a French braid that was faultless. And then I felt the most unimaginable calmness envelop me. I closed my eyes and breathed in the perfume of the soap that had magically cleansed my hair, and I allowed myself to relive the quietude and peacefulness that had marked those moments when my mother had braided it. When I finally opened my eyes, for a fleeting second I saw a woman there in the basement. I saw her beatific smile, and I saw, just over her shoulders, the tips of her luminescent wings. And then she was gone.

I gathered my roommate’s pills from the floor of the trunk and from the creases in the sheets, and I gathered myself. I was, I realized, laughing, and I wouldn’t stop for a long time that night. I laughed and I smiled as I packed up the trunk and the sheets and then started up the steps to the first floor of the dormitory.

And while it is possible to doubt or explain away so much of my first encounter with an angel, here is one absolute that I have never lost sight of and that has reinforced in my mind the concrete stolidity of this vision: My mother had never taught me how to French-braid my own hair. I had never done it myself. And I hadn’t had a French braid since at least two years before my mother had died.