Suicide Club

by Rachel Heng

  The clapping melted away into silence. Lea froze, looking up to meet her mother’s eyes.

  A flicker went across her mother’s face, something she didn’t recognize or understand.

  “Oh, Lea, look what you’ve done! Silly girl,” her mother said, an easy, wide smile plastered across her face. She pried the knife from Lea’s sticky fingers, holding it between her forefinger and thumb, playing to the crowd. “That’s the problem with our Lea,” she went on. “Always overenthusiastic.”

  Everyone laughed. It started as a canned, mechanical sound, awkward and forced, but then it eased into something more natural, something more like relief.

  Lea sat silently, staring at the dark wounds in the cake’s ivory surface. She wanted to plunge her hands into it, grab fistfuls of the creamy, buttery, poisonous sponge and stuff them into her mouth. She wondered what it would taste like, just the smallest crumb.

  Lea looked around. No one was staring at her anymore; if anything, they were consciously avoiding it. Hats and coats were being handed out, pulled on, kisses being exchanged.

  She turned her right hand up. She could feel the oily slick of buttercream in the web of her fingers, could see the crumbs that dotted her palm.

  Her mother was taking presents, saying goodbye to the guests. She wasn’t looking. Samuel had already started to tidy up, busy picking ribbons and used napkins off the floor. And her father—well, he wasn’t even here.

  So Lea brought her hand to her mouth, pressing her tongue against her palm. She thought it would be bitter, like all the other things she had been told were poisonous, the acrid burn of her father’s black shoe polish, the dull tart of the wetness inside her ears. Bitter was the taste of something going wrong, she understood that even then. And she wanted to taste it now, on the one day that he said he would be home and was not.

  But the taste that tingled through her mouth was unlike anything she had ever tasted before. It had the hint of a certain vegetable purée that her mother sometimes fed her, an aspect of it that she hadn’t noticed before, blown up and magnified and made wonderful. Lea rubbed her tongue against the roof of her mouth. No, there was no mistaking it. It tasted nothing like poison.

  Lea had stuck her tongue out again and was about to bring her other hand to her mouth when she looked up. Her mother was still saying goodbye to guests, who were milling about collecting goody bags and tying shoelaces, but in the midst of the chaos he had managed to come in unnoticed.

  Her father stood by the front door. The bulk of his stomach strained against his wet shirt; his coat dangled from one hand. His nose was shiny, shinier than usual, and sweat glinted at his temples.

  Part of Lea wanted to run to him, jump into his arms, bury her face in his bulk, but another part wanted to skulk away, crawl under a table and hide.

  The look on his face, though, kept her rooted in her chair. He was looking at her as if seeing her for the first time. A frown gripped his forehead, and his cheek dropped toward his shoulder. He was studying her.

  Lea realized her mouth was still open, her tongue still aimed toward her other buttercream-covered hand. She would be in trouble, she realized, now that he had seen her eating the poisonous cake. Strange, though, that he wasn’t shouting or running over to stop her. It only confirmed what she already suspected, that it wasn’t poisonous after all.

  Still, shame of being caught in the act prickled at her neck, and she began to close her mouth, dropping her hand. But then, something about the way her father was looking at her made her stop. She stuck her tongue out and brought her fingers to her mouth again. She did it slowly, so he would have the chance to stop her.

  But all he did was stare. He didn’t stop her. Something moved inside her belly, a chasm opening up, and she didn’t want the icing anymore. The sweetness suddenly tasted sickly in her mouth. She wanted to spit it out, to wash it clean with water. She started to cry.

  He was beside her in a flash, even before her mother could react.

  Why are you crying? There’s my birthday girl. There’s my little girl. Don’t cry now.

  His arms were around her, tanned and solid as wood. She eyed the tiny black hairs tufting his forearm, familiar in the way that they stopped far before his wrist. The comforting specks of dark and light, varied in a way that her mother’s smooth, poreless veneer was not. The folds of skin inside his elbows.

  Shhhhh. That’s enough, now.

  She breathed in the smell of him. He smelled savory, like a cut onion on the rare occasion that her mother cooked trad. Her head was pressed against his chest, her sticky hands resting around his neck, buttercream mingling with the sweat that seeped through his shirt.

  When Lea pulled her face away from the damp fabric of her father’s shirt and blinked her eyes open, almost everyone was gone. Quietly ushered out by her mother—Thank you for coming, oh it was just lovely, she’s just tired, you know how they get—who was now picking streamers off the floor with a single-mindedness that Lea recognized as anger. She had done it again, she knew, with a tired sinking feeling in her stomach. What it was, she wasn’t entirely sure, not yet, but she recognized the stiff angle of her mother’s mouth, the tautness of the skin over her collarbones.

  “Oh, hello there.”

  Lea looked up into her father’s face, immediately forgetting her mother’s anger. There he was, there was the familiar fold of his double chin, the flat, wide nose, the piercing eyes. The indentations on the left cheek that fascinated her so—no one else she knew had holes in their skin. They were caused by pimples, he had said. He’d had bad skin when he was younger, he told her, which meant that pores sometimes got infected, turning into red pus-filled bumps that left holes when they popped. Lea had never seen a pimple before.

  Something rustled in his hand. Lea looked down.

  It was crudely wrapped, as if it had been done in a hurry, the gold paper crumpled and folded, the tape ineptly applied. But she grabbed it anyway, a grin spreading across her face.

  “You’d think she hadn’t gotten any presents at all,” her mother said, an edge to her voice.

  But Lea wasn’t listening. She was ripping the paper off as quickly as she could, the shiny gold winking as it tore. The tail emerged first, mustard colored and plated with fins. Then the legs, the body, the small, pointed head. It was made of a rubbery plastic, as they always were. She saw now that the plates went all the way up its back, from the very tip of the tail to where its head began.

  She held the toy dinosaur by the tail, stared into its face. It looked almost human, she thought. She recognized it from the picture books. Lea furrowed her brow in concentration.

  “Steglo—”

  “Stegosaurus,” he said. “That’s right.”

  “Stegosaurus,” she said, her grin growing wider. “Look, Mom!” She waved the dinosaur at her mother by the tail. In spite of herself, Lea’s mother began to smile.

  “Look at that, honey,” she said. “How about you take that upstairs and start getting ready for your bath?”

  Lea nodded and slipped down from the chair.

  She hesitated, turning her face up to her father. “Are you coming?”

  That was how they always did it. Most days, her mother would bathe her, but whenever she got a new dinosaur, she knew that her father would do it, humming the familiar bath-time song as he always did. As he shampooed her hair, he’d tell her funny stories about the plastic dinosaurs lined up against the white bathroom tile. Stories about the tyrannosaurus rex, who wanted nothing more than to be able to clap his hands, or the pterodactyl, who used his wings as sails when he learned to windsurf. Lea wondered what the stegosaurus’s story was.

  He looked up at Lea’s mother, something passing between them that she couldn’t read. For a moment Lea felt her mood teetering—if he said no, she knew it would all come crashing down. She knew she would do it again, her mother would be angry again, they would fight. It would be her fault.

  But then he gave her a smile that showed his gums an
d hid his eyes. “Of course,” he said. “Why don’t you go ahead? I’ll be up soon.”

  A crash of happiness. Lea grinned back and bounded up the stairs, dinosaur in hand.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Anja had never slept well, but that night was worse than usual. That night she dreamed of machines that hankered for her flesh, the coils and scaffolding that lay beneath the floorboards of the apartment building. She dreamed of wires breaking through the ceiling, snaking around her mother. She dreamed of them not crushing her to death, no, that would have been a relief. Instead they plugged into her veins, and in her dream she grasped the terrible truth that this would give her everlasting life. She dreamed of the wires coming down like rain, like a rainforest, knotting and thickening until she could no longer see the door. She dreamed she would be there forever.

  When she awoke the next morning, she was covered in a thin film of sweat. She lay still for a moment, staring at the large brown stain on the ceiling, feeling the hard floorboards through the thin mattress. Her spine felt thick and twisted; her neck crunched as she straightened out. The swoosh of her mother’s blood and the thump of her heart seemed, for once, reassuring through the silence.

  Anja sat up. She couldn’t wait any longer. She was lucky that no one had shown up to ask about Branko yet, but she couldn’t count on her luck continuing.

  She grabbed a towel and the small basket that held her bath things, heading to the communal bathroom. Inside, a cockroach scuttled across a yellow sink. The showers at least were not too bad at this time of the day, far better than in the evenings when the drains were foamy with scum and the tiles strewn with hairs. She stepped in and cranked the hot water up.

  The water came out in a slow jet, barely enough to get her hair wet. The only thing that made it bearable was the heat. It was only ever ice cold or scalding, but she liked it scalding and was thankful it was today. She felt her skin redden in patches, moving her head left and right to let the water dribble down her shoulders and hips.

  She was never clean in this place, Anja thought suddenly. How could you be, with this pitiful trickle, where one half of your body was always dry? She remembered the swimming pool at Lea’s apartment, all that water in all that space, empty and looking out over the city. She thought of the showers there, the smooth, even jets that pounded her haunches with industrial strength, the multiple nozzles that emerged from the walls, the shower head the size of a dinner plate.

  She shampooed vigorously, scraping her scalp with her ragged fingernails to try and get them clean. It occurred to her that there were lakes in Canada. She remembered a documentary she’d seen about grizzly bears; she was sure it had been set in Canada. The image of a grizzly bear flickered, a powerful dark shape crouching against a shining white body of water, sparkling fish trapped between strong jaws. She imagined plunging into a lake like that, glittering and jewel-like, so cold it would take her breath away. She shampooed harder. The foam ran down into her eyes and drew stinging tears.

  * * *

  She was the last person left in the carshare when it finally reached the Outer Boroughs. No one who would normally take a carshare would come here, which she was glad for. It meant no judgmental or prying eyes, and solitude for the last half hour of her journey. It had cost an entire day’s wages, but there was no other way to get here. Two days’ wages, if you counted the way back.

  She smelled the Markets before she saw them. Roasted corn, stagnant water, an elemental, industrial tinge. And as she drew closer, the unmistakable whiff of human sweat. Here, on the outskirts of the market, people sat on the curb eating charred vegetables on sticks, and children in worn sneakers chased each other. Ahead of Anja, a lone woman in a tight knitted skirt and a ripped leather jacket leaned against a lamppost. She pulled at the ends of her hair in a way that she must have thought was suggestive, but really just looked nervous, as she called out to the men who passed her in the street. On the other side of the road, a man leaning on a stick shook a paper cup at her. The sign at his feet read: “Hungry and alone. Kidney for sale, pls inquire.”

  Anja hurried on. She was close now. She could hear the shouts and the crashes, smell the smoke and the dust. Finally, rounding the corner, she was there.

  The Markets were always a sight to behold. They occupied a broad expanse of low buildings, what must have once been some kind of industrial park, one of the many abandoned over the years in the Outer Boroughs. The buildings were the size of airplane hangars, their walls rusted corrugated iron or thin, flimsy brick. It was a wonder they were still standing, but standing they were.

  Anja didn’t even know how large the Markets were in all. She’d never walked their entire length; she didn’t know how far out they went, how many buildings and empty parking lots they occupied.

  The noise was an assault from all around. Children and hawkers shouted and squealed; wheels crunched through the dusty gravel and machines screamed. There had to be thousands, tens of thousands, millions of people there, more people than Anja had ever seen, even in Boroughs One through Five.

  Anja headed east, where the largest and the oldest buildings were, where she knew the warehouses still contained rotting conveyor belts and giant complex machines that an enterprising few put to work for their own purposes. If she was going to find what she needed, this would be her best shot.

  Moving through the crowd was slow going. Anja placed one hand on her waistband, where she felt the wad of cash rubbing against her skin. She didn’t stand out too much here, not the way someone like Lea would, but her smooth skin and clean clothes were enough to draw stares. Still, she thought, maybe it was a good thing. Even in the Markets, no one would lay a finger on a lifer.

  Finally she reached the factories. Here the people were mainly men, in dirty undershirts and with dark smudges of oil on their cheeks. There were more stares and the occasional whistle. Strangely, though, Anja felt safer here than elsewhere in the Markets, felt that her weakness was so conspicuous that if anyone tried anything, she could rely on mob justice to save her. Besides, it was no worse than being in the diner.

  She thought briefly of Branko and wondered where he was now. Had he come to the Markets too, in search of the pills for her?

  “Why the frown, sweetheart?” A man with matted, greasy hair and black fingernails called out to her. He leaned against a stall weighed down with huge nets of nuts and bolts, racks of gears that glinted dully in the sunlight. Despite the autumn chill, his chest was bare and slick with sweat.

  “Hello. Where can I find the vehicles?” Anja said, trying to ignore the leer on his face.

  “Vehicles! Whoa-ho. What’s a girlie like you doing looking for a vehicle?” The man turned to the stallholders around him, eyebrows raised, conspiratorial. They laughed.

  Anja pressed her lips together. “I need a car,” she said.

  His eyebrows shot up further, but he made no comment. “And what would you give me for it?” One of his friends sniggered.

  She walked up to the man who had made the comment. At first he held her stare, a smile curling at his lips as his friends whooped and cheered. But as she drew closer, unblinking, her chin held high and her eyes cold, he dropped his gaze and crossed his arms.

  “What do you want for it?” Anja said. Her cheeks burned, but for the first time in years, she felt a new strength coursing through her veins.

  The other stallholders sensed the change in atmosphere. They saw the embarrassed look that flashed across their friend’s face and slunk away, turning to their customers or machines or each other, starting up other, quieter conversations.

  “I was just kidding,” the man mumbled. “’Course, just joking around.” He lifted his eyes, sullen now. “We don’t get your kind around here often, is all.”

  He was not too far off from Branko in age or appearance, Anja realized, this close up. She looked at the rickety stall, at the slings of metal parts and tinny cash box nailed to the countertop. She wondered if the man had a brother too, or even a sister. />
  “See that pink building over there?” the man said.

  Anja squinted. All the buildings looked the same to her, peeling and dirty gray, but then she discerned that the paint on one of them was a faint salmon color. She nodded.

  He wiped his hand on his jeans and stuck it out. It took Anja a moment to realize what he was offering. She reached out and clasped his hand gingerly. It was cold and callused, like a leather mitt.

  “Abel,” he said.

  “Laurie,” she lied.

  “Laurie. Pretty name,” he said, but then held up his palms to her. “I mean, no disrespect. Hey, you know what, let me take you. You’ll get a better deal that way.”

  Anja protested, but Abel was already asking his neighbor to look after his stall while he was gone.

  “Come on,” he said.

  She followed behind him as he weaved his way between the haphazardly placed stalls. Despite his bulk, his step was nimble, and she almost lost him as he picked his way through the crowd. Still, she stayed close, never straying more than three or four paces away. No one bothered her now that she was with Abel.

  It was dark inside the pink building, the only light streaming in through the doorway and the holes in the corrugated-iron roof. The air was hot and stuffy, but at least there were fewer people here, and she could walk unhindered. But coming in from under the shining sun outside, Anja found herself momentarily blinded, the world a flickering, indistinct gray. She blinked and, as her eyes got used to the dark, saw that the room was filled with cars.

  They weren’t like the cars she saw on the streets of the Central Boroughs, though—those were sleek pods of efficiency, yellow and uniform for the most part, stamped with the different logos of the companies that owned them.