It’s unlikely that none of their customers have died. Given their track record, it’s equally unlikely that they’re handing out big checks to every orphaned widow who files a claim.
Hypothesis is a dangerous business. The allure of evidence is that of an Arabian lamp. One author, ten voices, an aberrant W-2. These things need hands. They need eyes and a mouth. They need someone behind them, flesh in their shadows.
Imagine her at her table. Always alone in a room that’s always dark. A palette of pens and fonts, handwriting copybooks, phrases, inflections, tendencies, emotions. Like William Ireland, who penned letters by Shakespeare. Van Meegeren and De Hory, who painted Vermeers and Picassos. Frank Abagnale, the great impersonator.
Aetna Simmons, forger of fantasies.
And Clocktower? Some unwritten rule, writing history before the fact: if someone’s policy is worth, say, a million or more, then given favorable circumstances, the insured is presumed a suicide.
Favorable circumstances? Access to the insured’s writing materials. A victim who at his time of death was capable of writing. No comas or catatonics. Perhaps for all big policies, Clocktower keeps a file on the insured’s linguistic idioms, grammatical idiosyncrasies, level of education, literary affectations. Handwriting samples, day planners, likely addressees. Psychological autopsy but in advance. By whom is the client made to feel unworthy? What has the potential to drive him to depression? Is he prone to drinking, speeding, risky boating? Where are his failures? Whence come his frustrations? What would it take to break him?
Everyone’s a failure and a charlatan. It wouldn’t be hard for a denizen of darkness, who spends her days slithering between faces, to find out and reveal where and how someone betrayed himself. Not only a forger but also what we call an author. Someone who discerns what silences might say.
Still, if it was me, I’d have deployed Aetna’s talents only when conditions promised a good outcome: the evidence is almost there, just needs a nudge from circumstantial to conclusive. Pills in the bathroom, corpse on the bed. All they need is a connection made explicit.
Reserve her for cases that would settle promptly with her help. Pay other claims so as not to draw attention to themselves. Two or three cases a year, that’s all; Clocktower could save millions, keeping their secret weapon squirreled away all the while. Their rulings on every claim would appear incontestable.
Imagine she gets sixty grand per note. Three notes a year, she hides the money around the world and spends the bulk of her time doing as she pleases. She could write novels, scholarly ramblings, avant-garde poetry. She could wear Versace, buy rare books, decorate her cottage with Danish furniture.
Keep to your shadows, you supple conjuror of clues, free as a ghost. You are the shades of all those dead insureds, whom you’ve taken it upon yourself to become.
Onryou. An angry spirit. Dissatisfied but dead, it’s helpless and frustrated. This is the haunting kind of ghost. It hangs around because some conflict binds it to the living world. People got the wrong idea about its death, let’s say, so the ghost loiters and lurks, plagued by the agony of an unreachable itch. Everyone believes it perished in an accident, failing to realize the car ran into the truck on purpose; and as a result of this oversight, a poor insurance company has to dole out two million. It’s so unfair the onryou cannot abide it, and it scours the world for a way to correct its mistake. Then yokatta! Here is Aetna. The onryou possesses her. It takes control of her genius and vocabulary. Through her, it engraves the truth upon the world. It explains that death was its own preference. It confesses that it violated the terms of its life insurance policy (though it never meant for anyone to get hurt, least of all Clocktower, which had taken such good care of its premiums over the years). It absolves the company of undue responsibility and with that discovers that its chains have lifted and dissolved.
Maybe I’m exaggerating about the onryou. Even without the supernatural angle, the Clocktower Hypothesis isn’t an easy swallow: the last written words of Aetna Simmons are really suicide notes, or early drafts thereof, written on behalf of other people who at the time of writing were already dead. Having sold the notes for a lot of money, the author repurposed them in a subtle narration of her own being-toward-death as described in the Aesthetic Hypothesis.
I know—bye, get crackin. But it’s not unheard of for people to leave multiple, authentic suicide notes. Virginia Woolf, for instance, wrote one note to her husband and a slightly different one to her sister. A guy named Gary Dubos left a couple versions of a suicidal poem.
But Gary and Virginia didn’t have W-2s from Clocktower. If each note is a mask Aetna contrived for someone else, it’s double camouflage for its secret author. The impression I’d formed of her grew inconstant and complicated, getting all mixed up with what little I knew of the crooked corporate world. Yet the Clocktower Hypothesis was the only explanation that made sense. The only way for all the evidence to fit together.
Ten suicide notes. Not a single signature. W-2. Macy and Tom. Grand Cayman.
A sliver of grass on top of a volcano.
Bermuda’s strange potency. Whispering forests along disused railway lines. A temperamental ocean and impulsive winds. A city built in illogical enthusiasm for color. A mystifying dialect involving car horns in expressions of gratitude.
A feather of limestone no more than a mile across—why does the great ocean leave it open to the air? The simple act of standing on such a slim contingency as this, this accident of an inhabitable squiggle, is a marvel by itself. One can’t help but feel better about oneself for being here.
Of course it’s nothing but an enchantment, that feeling; it’s the hocus pocus of the Devil’s Isles, confected not with smoke and mirrors but wildflowers and sunsets. Still, I can understand why the pseudo-suicidal would want to live here, someone who makes her living by pretending to want to die. Aetna wasn’t Bermudian; there would’ve been records. So it wasn’t a matter of slinking back like dying salmon, hounded home by a lack of opportunity. It wasn’t just secretive practicality, for while this nation is prone to being overlooked, Bermudians and gossip go together like Dark ’n’ Stormy. No, what bound her to this place was the need to like herself sometimes. She wrote on behalf of greed for the ruthless and deluded. Bermy could have been her Hallelujah.
She chose Simmons because it would blend in. That would explain why no Simmonses came forward when she disappeared.
But Aetna isn’t a Bermudian moniker. This one she chose as a symbol. Aitne in Greek, from aitho, I burn. The name of a nymph who took a suicidal risk. This nymph went round Zeus’ gates and got some ease. After the fact, it occurred to her to worry about his vindictive wife. The terrified nymph prayed the earth would swallow her; and Zeus, having moved on to some other longtail, happily obliged. A mountain grew on top of her, Mount Etna of Sicily, hot and disagreeable. In that mountain, Hephaestus forged Zeus’ famous thunderbolts whilst beneath it lay a woman imprisoned by her own terror and lust. The mountain pulverized Aetna’s humanoid form. Her children, sons of Zeus, came forth as hot springs.
The crater in which Bermuda rests forms the summit of a submerged and extinct volcano. So Aetna Simmons got herself swallowed by one of the earth’s corpses. The enchantment that fanned the flame of her vanity showed itself for what it was when the night came down. The island-archipelago’s resplendent colors faded to the uniformity of nothing. Ghosts and might-have-beens rose up to hem her in.
In the United States, there’s a little thing called a W-2. It has to do with “tax returns.” As I understand, if you’re caught without a “tax return,” men in black will show up at your house and make you watch while they purloin everything you own. They’ll drag you into the street and kick your ass in public, and while you’re lying there bleeding they’ll go into your house and lock you out. So I’ve heard.
The W-2 tells you what the US government gnaws off your paycheck before you even get t
o see it. It looks like a cage for a giant, rabid cougar; only that’s your salary peeking out between the bars, mewling because it’s about to lose a toe.
The reason I know so much about W-2s is that Aetna scrawled a suicide note on one of them. AS7, red ink from a rollerball or gel pen pressed too hard. A message in blood on the walls of her prison.
But where her social security tag should be, the form has been conveniently decapitated, its top edge cleanly severed: Box A is missing. Box E has her name and the address of a company that forwards mail to Bermuda via commercial airlines.
The form wasn’t dated, but at some point the US skimmed $25,714.29 off her salary of $85,714.29, leaving her $60,000. They took thirty percent, which means Aetna wasn’t a US citizen or permanent resident. If you’re one of those, they skim a little less. What’s weird is that round number. 60,000. Could be a coincidence, or Aetna had some arrangement with her company.
Let’s say she wanted $60,000 for services rendered. On account of the men in black, the company raised her basic salary to $85,714.29 so that after being skimmed she’d get exactly what she’d earned. If the company valued her enough to do that, then chances are they worked with her a lot, which would make this only one of several similar contracts. You can work on intermittent contract and still use W-2s. As a “consultant” of unspecified subspecies, that’s probably what she did.
A client of mine figured out all this. An American tax accountant. Americans think Bermudians have a gene that compels us to bully people into not paying their taxes. To me that makes no sense, but what do I know? I do appreciate the poetry in a tax form qua suicide note. Watching one’s livelihood waft away into the attenuated air between the clogged-up ears of politicians must surely feel like dying.
Since Sadira Bukhari won her lawsuit against Clocktower, Aetna probably didn’t work on Tom Bukhari’s case. She may have worked on Macy’s. If the Clocktower Hypothesis is right, she must have worked on it. The Ten, the W-2, and the company’s subsequent low profile suggest she stayed with Clocktower until she disappeared.
Macy died four years ago. So Aetna’s career spanned at least four years but wasn’t as long as a decade.
Was Aetna Simmons a copycat suicide? Was she like all those lovesick Biedermeier youths who went around killing themselves just because they read Young Werther? Could some random dead person get under her skin that much? Impossible. Aetna was harder than that, more original than that. She wouldn’t have lasted four years otherwise. Besides, the chances were low that anyone she wrote about really committed suicide. That was the point. That was the challenge.
Think of the pressure. First she had to wait around for people to die. Then every word she wrote had to bear up under forensic analysis. One hint of malapropism, and she was vulnerable. If that happened, Clocktower would’ve hung her out to dry. I’d bet my MG on it.
Maybe it got to be too much. She lived two lives or more at once, bore as many names and regularly threw them all aside like unwashed clothes. She confused herself until one day she realized she was living between mirrors, only none of the reflections looked like any of the others and she couldn’t bear it. Short-circuit suicide. The only thing she did with a shred of authenticity.
Or Clocktower sold her short somehow. She wanted it to hurt when she struck back. Revenge-suicide. Muscle them into the spotlight, darting under it herself in the instant before she pulled the plug, then merging with the shadows forever. She’d disappear, somebody would get curious, find the W-2, and put the whole thing together.
Every time I thought I understood, I’d come up with another, contrasting scenario. This went on for weeks. One night, waking from a nightmare, I wondered about murder.
Missing woman, missing police file, missing computer. Photo in The Bottom Line.
Caines Asset Management ranks highly among the Western Hemisphere’s Top Ten Investment Management Companies (Forbes, if you want to know). An alliance between Clocktower and CAM would be deadly. Could infect a police inspector with selective blindness. A landlady would be an inexpensive purchase. An author skilled in forgery would be a broken-legged ant.
And the truth? We can speculate. Aetna’s angry and afraid. She arranges a meeting with somebody from Clocktower, blackmail on the brain, or with an attorney and the FBI. She knows Clocktower plans to get rid of her for some reason. She decides to turn herself in, hope the law can protect her. Gathers her evidence. Puts it out where she can see it. Means to grab it on the way to the meeting.
But she never gets there. She disappears instead. Whoever she was supposed to meet, they get scared, say nothing. Or they’re in on it. They lure her in, get her on a boat and out to sea in concrete shoes. She’s got her laptop with her. They lash it to her chest.
Or they terrorized her into taking the bull by the horns. They turned her life into a prison. They exploited her. But they also underestimated her. They never thought she’d turn terror into courage, courage into freedom. But she did. She did it because of them.
Or someone dropped some hints. Like J. Edgar Hoover when he wrote to Martin Luther King to convince him that his life wasn’t worth living. Where Hoover failed, Aetna’s betrayer succeeded, infecting her with their morbid desire. Murder by suicide.
The nightmares got worse. Now as I scurry through the labyrinth of hostile tomes, fleeing invisible horrors, I know the black two-tongued books won’t let me touch them, and I know Masami waits for me in some corner. Ryuu no ikiryou. What could be worse? The thought of running into her weakens my legs with tremors as I run faster and faster. I take corners at random. I double back only to turn about, trying to make my course unpredictable. I sense her behind me even though I know she’s up ahead somewhere. Sure enough, I turn a corner: there she is. That gray suit, she’s like a monolith. The blood in her face seems to glow. Her furious, damning gaze engulfs me in a fiery black wind; that great big shining quill—
I woke up with a shout, panting like I’d actually done all that running. If I was alone, I took something to calm down. If not, I subjected poor Nabi to my outburst. She stroked my head until I fell asleep, and in the morning she accepted that I couldn’t bring myself to tell her much.
What was I supposed to say? My family might be in up to its scaly neck in devilry that may have caused a woman’s death? That wouldn’t have made sense. I was bucking up Masami in the bookstore of my dreams before I’d ever seen The Bottom Line.
Besides, it was a shock, but it wasn’t. Masami’s goals in life include hoarding prestige, growing her empire, and devouring money. There was even talk of her taking on HSBC, and I wouldn’t put it past her. That woman is a dragon on a mountain of gems. The people around her must fortify the mountain. Everyone at CAM lives to make the mountain bigger. Hard work is no work if it doesn’t make the mountain grow. You fail to feed the mountain, you’ll be eaten. The disgrace of your failure will be your condiment. Being eaten means being broken down, drained, and excreted.
I know what you’re thinking. If I didn’t know better, I wouldn’t believe me either.
But the books. Seeking myself in the labyrinth, I found the slippery black books instead. Perhaps it was not my name I sought but theirs. A gut feeling—I had to. Why? Not because of Masami. Because of Aetna, author of black books.
Her cloak of swirling shadows. Her plethora of masks. The way she manipulated death, rebelled against life, convoluting history. That perverse valiance. My hypotheses weren’t enough.
I spent a lot of time with the Ten spread out before me. I saw her face, beseeching me to understand. Yet even as her image seemed to grow brighter and clearer, the shadows around her became blacker and heavier, slippery and skittish with elusive questions. Each of the Ten had its own shadows.
What really are these things? Where in hell did they come from? A stash that grew when inspiration struck? Would Aetna draw from it when she received a coded message? Or did she sit down to write only w
hen the message came, after someone died and Clocktower found material for a forger’s costume?
How many altogether? I envision the Ten as a bouquet cut from acres of garden.
AS3.
Typewritten on white strip. The rest?
Aetna couldn’t afford a family or friends, only co-conspirators. Crooked underwriters and actuarial assistants hidden inside Clocktower like sleeper cells. They wouldn’t have known her well, hidden as she was herself. I imagine they hired her online. With empty wallet keening, she grabbed whatever she could find at freelancewrite.org. Anyway, real friends don’t let friends suffer premature mortality.
Whoever they were (and this is really something), each of them could’ve received their very own copy of AS3. She typed several to a page and finished them with scissors: imprecise, slanting cuts surround the slender text. Perhaps the strips showed up in pigeonholes at Clocktower’s headquarters. Sneaked in with the agenda for the next board meeting. Squeezed into tiny envelopes, perhaps accompanying flowers.
The text (nine words) may look like it was written in a hurry. It’s nonspecific and ambiguous. It’s pointless to delay turning herself in works just as well as It’s pointless to delay the culmination of all ends. And done need not mean “done with life.” It could mean “done with” something that the author leaves unspecified, confident that her readers will know what she’s referring to.
But the whole phrase, What’s done is done, has the somber toll of suicidal forgiveness and farewell blessing. It also sounds like George Eastman. Eastman invented Kodak film. In 1932, he shot himself in the chest after penning this contribution to suicidal literature:
Drafts of a Suicide Note Page 7