I managed a kind of laugh.
“You don’t get it.”
“No, I get it. She did love you, Trader. I’m sure of that.”
“Yeah, but not enough to stick around. Okay. Let’s do ‘distressed.’ I apologize in advance. It’ll be no damn use to you.”
“Let’s do it anyway.”
“We spent Sunday nights apart. So it always seemed like a good idea to go to bed together late Sunday afternoon. That’s what we always did. And that’s what we did on March fourth. I’d like to say, I’d really like to say it felt different, that Sunday. Like during the act of love she ‘went away,’ or ‘disappeared.’ Or some such. We could cook something up, couldn’t we? Have her say something like, ‘Don’t make me pregnant.’ But no. It was exactly like it always was. I drank a beer. I said goodbye. So why was I ‘distressed’?”
By now his voice was sounding like my tape recorder when the battery’s about to fritz. I lit a cigarette and waited.
“Okay. On my way down the stairs, I tripped on my shoelace. I knelt to retie it, and it snapped. I also caught a hangnail in my sock. On my way out the side door I ripped my coat pocket on the handle. That’s it.
So when I hit the street I was naturally very ‘distressed.’ Mike, I was suicidal.”
I wanted to say: I’ll come over.
“ ‘Fuck him, give him five bucks.’ I thought that was pretty funny the first time around. Now it makes me scream with laughter.”
I wanted to say: I’m coming over.
“Oh, Christ. I just didn’t get it, Mike.”
That list headed Stressors and Precipitants—there’s not much left of it now. To keep myself quietly amused, I think about compiling another list, one that would go something like:
Astrophysics Asset Forfeiture
Trader Tobe
Colonel Tom Pop
Beautiful
But where’s the point in that? Zugts afen mir, right? We should all be so lucky. And even though we aren’t, we’re still here.
Stressors and Precipitants. What remains? We have: 7. Other Significant Other? And we have: 5. Mental Health? Nature of disorder: a) psychological? b) ideational’organic? c) metaphysical?
Now I cross out 7.1 cross out Arn Debs.
Now I cross out 5 a). After some thought I cross out 5 c). And then my head gives a sudden nod and I cross out 5 b). That, too, I excise. Now there’s nothing.
It’s 3:25 before it hits me. Yesterday was Sunday. The night train must have been through hours ago. Hours ago, the night train came and went.
On the evening Jennifer Rockwell died, the sky was clear and the visibility excellent.
But the seeing—the seeing, the seeing—was no good at all.
Part Three
T H E S E E I N G
This is where I felt it first: In the armpits. On March fourth Jennifer Rockwell fell burning out of a clear blue sky. And that’s where I first felt the flames. In my armpits.
I woke late. And alone—though not quite. Tobe was long gone. But somebody else was just leaving.
The morning after she died Jennifer was in my room. Standing at the foot of the bed till I opened my eyes. Then of course she disappeared. She returned the next day: Fainter. And again, and always fainter. But this morning she was back with all her original power. Is that why the parents of dead children spend half the rest of their lives in darkened rooms? Are they hoping the ghosts will return with all their original power?
She wasn’t just standing there, this time. She was pacing, for hours, pacing swiftly, bent, lurching. I felt that Jennifer’s ghost was trying to throw up.
Trader was right: Making Sense of Suicide doesn’t make sense of anything much, including suicide. But yet it told me what I needed to know. Its author didn’t tell me. Jennifer told me.
In the margins of her copy of the book, Jennifer had made certain marks—queries, exclamation points, and vertical lines, some straight, some squiggly. She had marked passages of genuine interest, such as might have struck anyone who was new to the field: Like the bigger the city, the higher the rate. Other passages, I can only think, were just being heckled for their banality. Examples: “Many people sadly kill themselves around exam time.” “When encountering a depressed person, say something like, ‘You seem a bit low,’ or, ‘Things not going well?’” “In bereavement, make yourself better, not bitter.” Yeah, right. Do do that.