Suicide Club

by Rachel Heng

  Now a woman sitting across from Lea was telling the group, in a pleading tone, about how she’d sliced the tip of her little finger off while dicing carrots for her husband’s dinner.

  “A very thin slice,” she said. “Barely drew any blood at all. Just to see if I can even bleed anymore. Sometimes you wonder, you know, with all they put in you. Don’t you? Don’t you wonder?”

  George was surprisingly sympathetic. Lea gathered that the woman, Susan, had already made great progress and was a testament to the efficacy of their program. She was the pride of WeCovery, the golden girl. George expressed his certainty that this minor relapse was a mere blip in the journey of her reformation. He alluded to a certain Fateful Day, reminded her how much blood had flowed then, how it had got into the cracks between the kitchen tiles. It had been so expensive for her husband—poor old Greg, he worked so hard to get it all cleaned up and back into her veins.

  Meanwhile, Lea emptied her lungs and was counting to five in her head. A faintly dizzy sensation, not entirely unpleasant, came over her. But even so her heart continued to race.

  It would be George, perspiring into his plastic chair, who would decide when she could be taken off the List. When her life would return to normal. It would be George she would have to convince, George she would have to not tell about her father on the other side of the road.

  Lea held an out-breath as she tried to think.

  “Lea. Your turn, quick intro. Don’t worry, we won’t bite!” George guffawed.

  They were all looking at her. George’s face was shiny and expectant. The ceiling lights were unforgiving in their scrutiny—every liver spot and ingrown hair was clearly visible.

  “I don’t want to kill myself,” she said at last.

  A gleeful look crossed George’s face. He might as well have rubbed his hands together. The others looked away.

  “Now, Lea,” George said, relishing every word like the charred, protein-denatured animal flesh he probably poisoned himself with. “The first stage is always denial. But that’s okay, we can deal with this.”

  “Deal with what?”

  “Of course you have life-ending tendencies. By the way, please note we don’t use the ‘K’ word at WeCovery. In any case, it’s perfectly normal to feel the way you do. It’s a difficult thing to accept, but trust me on this, acceptance is the most difficult step of all. Do you trust me, Lea?”

  “I really think they’ve got it wrong,” Lea said, as politely as she could manage. “With all due respect, do I seem like someone who wants to kill herself?”

  Ambrose winced as she spoke, curling further into his chest.

  “Please stop saying that.” George’s smile tightened. “And such tendencies are very deeply rooted. You’re going to have to dig deep, Lea. Are you ready to dig deep?”

  This was worse than talking to the Observers. Lea felt her cortisol levels rising again.

  “I’m having some doubts about this—this treatment.” She resisted the urge to make air quotes with her fingers. “Are you even qualified for this?”

  At George’s temple, a vein bulged.

  “You think you’re above this,” he said, flinging one arm out toward the wall with the plaques. “Ms. I-Work-In-Healthfin-Capital-Management. I have your full bio and case notes. What did you think was going on here, exactly?”

  Lea’s mouth gaped open. “How can you—” she began.

  “Oh my God, George, leave her alone.” It was the woman next to her, Anja.

  “Anja, please, I’m only doing my job,” George said, but there was something new in his tone.

  “Your job? How is bullying a new, uninitiated member of the group doing your job?”

  “I wasn’t bullying—I—”

  Anja examined her nails. “Can we just move on?”

  George glared at Lea but didn’t say anything more. He went on to the extremely eager man next to her, who started regaling them with every thought and feeling he had experienced over the past week. The man began describing the quiet despair that the sight of a single poached egg at breakfast induced in him on Tuesday morning.

  Lea glanced at Anja, tried to catch her eye to nod a thank-you, but Anja was staring steadfastly into the distance. Who was she?

  * * *

  When George clapped his hands for the last time and declared the meeting of the WeCovery Group over, Lea blinked as if coming out of a trance. Suddenly it hit her again—the mustard carpet, the artificial light, the lack of ventilation. Everyone was smiling and buoyant, even Ambrose, who in the course of the meeting had tied his long hair up into a perky ponytail. They nodded and grinned at Lea as they filed out of the room. Even George flashed her a reluctant smile.

  Only Anja was left. Lea watched as she wound a scarf around her neck. Her movements were slow and deliberate, weighted down by a strange precision, as if it were of crucial importance that her outerwear be put on just so.

  “Why are you here?” Anja asked.

  “It’s part of my treatment plan,” Lea said. “I just want to go back to normal.”

  “Back to normal. Uh-huh,” Anja said. She seemed to be thinking it over, fingers tugging at her scarf. “What are you hiding?”

  “What?” Lea flushed.

  “It makes no sense. Someone like you shouldn’t be here. What are you not telling them?”

  Her father, her strong, young father, running thirty blocks in bedroom slippers, Samuel on his back. Her father across the street, hunched and slow. Her father in the clinic, mistaken for a sub-100.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lea said.

  Her father slipping a napkin with a phone number on it into her purse.

  Anja stared at her for a long moment. Finally she shrugged. “Fine. See you next week,” she said.

  TEN

  Lea waited on the hard bench with her hands wedged under her thighs, bare palms against the smooth, worn wood, where countless others had sat before. The wind whipped her hair into her face. At first she tried to push it away, but after a while she let it flit over her eyes and nose uninhibited.

  It was just starting to turn cold. The trees were aflame and the sky a proud, clear blue. The air chafed at her eyes, making them water. If her father arrived now, he would think she was crying, and that would be too embarrassing to bear, as well as entirely misleading.

  Her hands were going numb. He was late. She usually hated it when anyone was late, but she didn’t mind now. Her mind contained an idle blankness, filled by the brittle chill of the air and the ashy churn of the Hudson. It was one of those in-between moments, suspended in time.

  “Lea.”

  He was standing behind her, wearing the same beige coat, but with the addition of a thick scarf that had shed wisps of dark wool all over his shoulders. He held himself tightly, like someone who had forgotten how to exist in the cold. She wondered for the first time since seeing him where he had been in the time that he was gone.

  “Hi.” She swallowed the word Dad.

  Lea half rose from her seat, just as her father bent to sit. They laughed. She sat back down, and he sat next to her.

  “I’m so glad you called,” he said.

  She’d called him after leaving the WeCovery Group. Standing outside the brownstone, she watched Anja in the distance, her gray coat flapping in the wind. Anja’s words went round and round in Lea’s head, like buzzing flies trapped behind a patio door. What are you hiding?

  She watched Anja get smaller and smaller, until finally she disappeared around a corner. Lea was alone in the street now. She pulled out her tablet to call a car share, but then found herself digging in her purse for the napkin her father had given her instead.

  The silence between them now was loud, louder than when they had met in the smoothie bar with all those people around them. Lea shifted in her seat.

  Her father turned to her. “What is it you do? At your job?”

  “Oh, it’s boring,” she said automatically. “No one likes to hear about col
lateralized obligations and maturity rates.”

  “Try me,” he said.

  And suddenly she remembered those light-filled days, one summer nearly a hundred years ago, when Samuel had finally got his first job. He was a clerk at a company that imported things like ball bearings and conveyor belts, and he was to fill in error reports for delays in shipments. Years later she realized it had been a dreary, mind-numbing job. But back then, when her father slapped Samuel on the shoulder so hard that his glasses slid down his nose, it had sounded like the most wonderful thing in the world. She remembered how Kaito had been endlessly interested in Samuel’s work, questioning him on the minutest details of his day whenever he got home. And Sharona did what with the W8-E11B form? No! But surely she knew that was a W8-E11F! She remembered the love shining in her father’s face as he drew the details of his day out from Samuel, how he polished each nugget of mundane information with such care and enthusiasm that it emerged as a sparkling, beautiful story of success.

  So Lea told him about her work. She told him about the commodity markets, the derivatives that had developed around them, the underlying drivers of supply and demand. She told him about the algorithms they used to help them trade, the clients they serviced. She told him about the kidneys, the hearts, the lungs that the traders never saw, but that existed somewhere out there, in some vast clearinghouse for the physical organs themselves. She told him about the different grades the organs were classified under. She told him about Jiang and Natalie, and her office high above the city, how much she loved sitting at her desk, how despite the recent troubles, it brought her peace as nothing else ever did.

  Lea snuck sideways glances at him as she talked, but otherwise stared out at the gray buildings across the Hudson. Every now and then he asked a question. They were sensible, thoughtful questions, questions that showed he was listening. Lea talked and talked, until at last she had nothing left to say.

  They fell silent again. But this time it felt natural, them watching the sparse joggers and people with dogs go by. It was a thing a father and a daughter might do, Lea thought.

  “Hey,” he said. “What do you say we go for a walk?”

  * * *

  The park was a sliver of green clinging to the edge of the Central Boroughs, spanning its full length, Boroughs One to Five. Lea and her father walked along the cement pathway, the river a slow, churning gray on the other side of the railing.

  The official position on high-impact sport changed every few years, as scientists sponsored by different corporations and Ministry bodies raced to release papers and research studies. But the latest advisory was negative, so Lea and her father had the running paths mainly to themselves. A few stubborn joggers passed every now and then, their faces pink with cold and overworked capillaries. Lea herself had given up running a decade ago, as had most people she knew, spooked by the constant vacillation within the scientific community.

  Still, she felt a twinge of envy as she watched the runners go by, their mouths pinched into greedy, huffing circles, eyes focused on some distant point. Bodies tense or loose, depending on the runner, but always moving with that same pounding, consuming rhythm. She missed it. The wind in her hair, the thump of blood in her ears, the hurtling feeling.

  Her father walked slowly. At first it frustrated her, this ambling pace, and it was all she could do not to leave him behind. But she made a conscious effort to slow down, matching his short, uneven strides, stopping when he did, to look at some building or person.

  “Amazing, isn’t it?” he said, raising his palm to the buildings that dominated the length of the park. Presenting them to her for comment.

  Lea nodded. She rarely thought about it, the city, but it was.

  “And you. You work up there, in one of those towers!” he said. Lea felt warm at the pride in his voice. “The most advanced financial system in the world. Kidneys. Hearts. Lungs,” he went on. But then she noticed the bitter edge that tinged his words, the familiar hint of mockery.

  “If you hate it so much—if you hate all of it so much—then why did you come back?” she burst out. “I have a life now, a life I spent years building, one that you know nothing about. If you hate it so much, I don’t understand why you’re even here.”

  He was silent. They kept walking. Lea’s cheeks were hot, despite the cold. She already regretted what she had said, so when her father finally spoke again, remarking on an impossibly white poodle being walked nearby, Lea responded with far too much enthusiasm.

  “Do you like dogs, then?” he asked, a bemused smile curling at his lips.

  She’d never thought about it before, but she nodded yes.

  “I used to have a dog, did you know? Before you were born, before Samuel was born even, goodness.” He let out a chuckle. “When your mother and I moved into our first house, back when you could still afford a house in the Central Boroughs on a single income. His name was Peeves. He was the sweetest dog you’d ever meet. Our friend had a kid, must have been four, five years old. They used to come over for dinner on Saturdays. Peeves would let that kid sit on his back, like a horse. Can you believe it? The kid loved it, was always pulling on poor Peeves’s ears. He had these long, floppy ears, some kind of golden retriever mix.”

  “They’re meant to be good for you, you know, dogs,” Lea said. “Studies have shown. Cortisol lowering. But only certain breeds, there’s a list.”

  Her father laughed. “And the other breeds? They’re what, cortisol raising?”

  “I suppose so.” She bristled, for he was laughing at her, but then saw, briefly, the absurdity of what she had said. She smiled too.

  The story about Peeves was the first story he told her. It set something off within him, for as they walked, he started to tell her other stories too.

  * * *

  “Your mother was dating someone else when we first met. She had a nice Nigerian boyfriend, the son of her parents’ friends, a solid guy. Engineering degree from a top school, like her, destined for greatness. A good match, you know? Their families knew each other. She walked into the party with him that night, she was in this yellow dress, off-the-shoulder, I remember, and one of the sleeves kept falling down. And she’d pull it back up again like it was the most natural thing in the world, like that was part of the outfit, no self-consciousness, nothing. She was a very beautiful woman, but that wasn’t it. It was the way she commanded the room, the way she listened, drew people out of themselves, the stories she told. The way she made you feel like you could be better, that there was so much more out there. She was one of those people everyone wanted to be around, the most brilliant woman I’d ever met.”

  * * *

  The stories came faster as they walked, the silences between them shortening into a few breaths. There was nothing obvious connecting them—Lea’s father jumped around in space and time, starting a new one as soon as the last one ended.

  After a while, Lea noticed that his stories were only about the time before he left, stories from Lea’s childhood or before she was born. Never about what happened after. Never about where he’d been after he left.

  * * *

  Suddenly, Kaito stopped walking. “Oh,” he said.

  “What is it?” Lea turned to him.

  Her father was staring at the pavement some way ahead of them. “It’s gone,” he said.

  Lea blinked and looked around them. There was nothing remarkable about where they had stopped.

  Her father was shaking his head, still contemplating the empty space in front of him. Slowly he removed his hand from his chin and placed it back into his pocket. For the first time, Lea noticed how large his ears had gotten, the lobes stretching almost down to the scarf wound around his neck. Her own ears felt tight and small in the cold.

  “Of course it is,” he said. “How silly of me.”

  “What’s gone?” Lea asked.

  “You don’t remember. Well, of course you don’t, you must have been, what, nine? We used to come on Sunday afternoons, when your m
other went to her book club. We’d get one each, one for you, one for me, and one for Samuel.”

  And suddenly she did remember—the sticky trail dripping down the side of a cone, leaking between her fingers. Licking it off as fast as she could, while her father and Samuel cheered her on. The taste of chocolate, sweet, cold, perfect.

  * * *

  Memory worked in strange ways when you had lived to a hundred and beyond. For the most part, the things that had happened in her early childhood were the ones that could be counted on to stay put. They were the permanent fixtures, firmly lodged into the architecture of the mind, screwed to the baseboards.

  So Lea could remember how the lump of dried gum she found stuck beneath the oak dining-room table felt, wedged under her fingernails. She could remember the sweet taste of soap bubbles she tried to catch on her tongue. She remembered the way that Samuel had always smelled of trees, her mother of rain.

  The feeling of a dry cough rising in her throat, the unbearable tickle that kept her awake one full night. The time she had been bitten by a fire ant at the beach in Indonesia, back when there was no advisory against travel to countries that didn’t respect the Sanctity of Life Act, and her hands had swollen into paws, her face into a red-hot itching lump. The sting of pulling off a toenail blackened from running in too-small shoes.

  The things she forgot were those that happened in the broad expanse of adulthood. The older she got, the faster the years sped by, and the less of an impression anything made. The facts of her adult life were couched in general truths rather than in details. She knew where she had worked, whom she had dated, what she had done in the last seventy years or so. But she knew them as abstract facts, not as the acrid smell of a lover’s breath or the sting of humiliation upon losing a client for the first time. She had once forgotten a friend entirely, someone she had known in university and remained close with for two decades after.

  Sometimes it scared her that so much was lost, but she knew it was normal, that most people she knew forgot most of their lives, too. But her childhood—that was always there, safe, neatly arranged, chronological. From her childhood she could remember a million details. So it was strange, disconcerting, to find now that there was something she had missed. The taste of chocolate—cold and perfect. With the taste came the rustling of the trees, the wind scraping her cheeks, a smooth, bony hand gripped in hers. Her brother’s eyes.