“I know.”
“I couldn’t stay here if I had to risk bumping into certain people on the street and everything.”
“Yes.”
My heart moved. My breathing stopped. Yes, I’d run after her naked to relaunch an appeal that was no news to her at all. But it had never got so far before.
“Yes, so what about the business?”
“We’d be okay.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means sell the business.”
Clearing my throat when horror flooded Nabi’s face.
“Sell Bull Head’s Shreds,” she breathed. “Just like that.”
“We’d be okay for money.”
“Is that so?” Now her eyebrows came down like storm clouds over the horizon. “Kenji, do you realize Bull’s Head Shreds is all I have of my very own?”
“Come on, that’s not true—”
“Martin’s the one who Brought All The Assets Into The Marriage.”
His words, not hers.
“Everything else is really his. And baby, face it.” With visible effort, she gathered her exhaustion and exasperation, she tucked it all into an imaginary bubble and blew away the bubble in an empty kiss. Pfoo, bubble, fly away; she’d learned it in a self-help book. Then she smiled like a new morning, for one more pernicious moment filling me with hope. I grasped her hands, she even laughed, just a whisper of laughter.
“Face it, sweet genius. Without the business we’d be broke as one-legged tables.”
“No, Nabi.”
“That’s right. Broke. Both of us, you beautiful man, you.”
She kissed me on the nose.
“What about the HDS? Diversification, everything. You don’t want to give up everything we built together.”
“That’s not all we built, Nabi.”
“Aw, you’re a sweetie.” She checked her phone, dropped it in her Bandoulière. “Where’re your car keys, baby?”
I said something such as, “On the…right on the—”
She found them anyway. Came back, looked at me like she needed to say something. She kissed me for a while. And when she spoke, her voice was all messed up, like mine.
She said, “Bye, you’re done. And the sun’s just coming up.”
Her smile was an exertion. She poked me in the chest.
“And it’s your own fault, innit,” she said. “Call me when you wake up. Or if you have that dream again. Next time you gonna tell me exactly what you dreamed, step by step, no excuses, hear?”
She kissed the wallet and the mini-planner, dropped them in her bag, patted it with the hand that bore her wedding ring, hung her briefcase over her shoulder. I hadn’t moved, I was still staring at her, I mean here she is telling me to give up for her sake on the only decent work that had ever come my way and flatly denying that she’d ever do the same for me. I was so dismayed I could neither pull away nor make a sound as she took my hands, led me back to bed. As she arranged the blankets round my chin, her phone rang out like a blow to the head.
She said, “Hi, honey,” and kissed my forehead. And left me with her phone pressed to her check, sending monosyllables to Geneva or wherever. And the ceiling came crashing in.
Every time that bastard calls from abroad, Nabi starts with the same bullshit. Why, everything’s just fine honey, work’s good, nothing of note on the news. She made a joke about it once: she could make a tape recorder talk to Martin, he’d enjoy it. Here I am trying to conduct an important conversation with the woman, panicking fit to faint, and fucking begging her; and acegirl’s got the crust to actually answer her phone, like my panicking fit to faint is something she could put on hold or just forget to notice while she said yes to Martin again and again. I should’ve grabbed her phone and smashed it. Whatever kept us coming back here to take each other’s clothes off, I should’ve smashed that too, smashed up all our hope.
I didn’t. I lay like a watermelon dropped from a great height.
My Zohytin hides in a hollowed-out Collected Works of Thomas Hardy. I took two more of the pieces I’d cut up during the night. Then I thought to hell with it and took the last one. Giddy and floating, I reread a scene I knew by heart: self-righteous Angel Clare spurns his pretty new wife Tess, who offers to kill herself if it would end his unfair scorn. I slept a while and then, wasted, I called Doreen.
Sometimes tug-of-warring bumper cars gets to be a bit much. Them byes seem to think I’m got nothing but them 2 to fill the space between my ears. Tonight from NYC my husband tells me I’m got a real talent for “administration,” meaning I should leave actual thinking up to him. I disobeyed him. He don’t know it cuz I lied to him too, Lord have mercy. Scare of the century: something Kenji said made me wonder if I’d done it right, if I’d left traces after all. I’ve built my whole life around getting rid of traces, making sure documentation doesn’t live to do damage. All sorts of what-if in my head as I dived into the bank again. I fixed it, double-checked, & this time it was right. (“Give thanks to the Lord of lords, His love endures forever!”) The problem was a “:”. That’s how it is in this shadow world. Everything stands on the head of a pin.
Worrying what K’s up to. Aceboy never says it, but I know he’s disappointed that I never had it in me to throw caution to the wind, fling people’s expectations back in their faces. But he did, & it worries me, how far he might go. & now this thing with Iesha!! She said (again), “Nabilah, I warned you better watch yourself now. Matter of time, etc.” Well, Iesha don’t know nothing. Merciful Lord Jesus, help me not to “blow this out of proportion” like one of them byes would do. It’s nothing, I hear You telling me it’s nothing. I know my Baby. Maybe I was too flippant with him earlier, but what else could I do? I mean, my gracious, what was he thinking, what more does he want from me??!
I don’t mean (forgive me, Lord) about Martin, Kenji made himself quite clear about Martin, but that’s a different thing. That’s just men’s egos & plain old jealousy. I’m talking about BHS. I’m saying all I’ve done & made that has to stay a secret could lead to my little enterprise, Bull’s Head Shreds, taking a big step forward that this little worker bee wouldn’t have dared to dream that it was ready for. & that’s a good thing. Kenji said it’s a good thing! He said he knows I could do it! HDS, MSU, the whole kit & kaboodle. So then what, he just forgot? He just forgot he said I should spend $200K cuz BHS is doing well & it could do even better? The man says “I know you can do it” & turns around & says “sell the business”??!!! Why not stick me on a speeding moped & then stick a lightpole out in front of it?!
Now, I know he didn’t mean it, Baby was just upset, he was confused. He woke up screaming, Lord have mercy. But that’s cuz of the suicide thing, & Lord I asked You to protect him. Save my Baby, Good Lord Jesus, from the horror of those deaths. (10 suicide notes, mercy, what was SHE thinking?!) You know how Kenji is, You know I can’t have him carrying that around inside him. You see, he doesn’t actually need me to wreck my marriage, he certainly doesn’t want me selling out on my career, all that was poor K being too freaked out to think properly, & You know my Baby loves to think. So. See what I mean? You gotta help him.
What am I gonna do meantime, You ask? I’ll pray harder. I’ll forget that Kenji didn’t see how he’d hurt me, I’ll forget he said all that stuff about M & BHS. I’ll do my feasibility study. I’ll be optimistic. (“For the hope of future joy, sound His praise thru earth & Heaven.”) The thing is K thinks nobody understands his creativity, not even me, I could see it when I told him (again) to lay off the suicide thing. How bad would it be if I just said: Baby it’s true you really can’t go there, but I do understand, I really do, like nobody else in the whole world, & there’s so many different ways to feel it! Wouldn’t that light K right up? Wouldn’t that fix everything? So Baby wouldn’t feel like there’s something he’s missing? Then maybe he’d quit worrying ab
out Martin? Course since he’s K he’d ask me why, how come my “creative understanding” is so perfect, & I’d say…???
What if I said I made a girl.
Oh Lord, not that kind! My gracious! Iesha’s always telling me I should let Martin “child me up” (she don’t say it like that, of course) cuz then I’d have to “settle down & be sensible” (that’s what she says). Like having people screaming the house down half the time, school fees, school uniforms, video games, pediatricians, hamsters, vomit on the floor, chicken pox, hair lice, pinkeye, music lessons, swimming lessons, etc etc etc, so you’re as constantly broke as our Mummy & Daddy is anything close to sensible. No Thank You on that kind, Lord. One thing I will never be again is broke. After Auntie Time with my nieces I’ll go home to my nice unmortgaged house. 2 byes in bumper cars is more than enough for me.
When I say “made,” I mean on my computer.
NABILAH. I know. But I’m worried. Remembering just a little will give me a boost. & that’ll help me think better. Where’s the harm? My book is only mine.
I did it all by myself, pretty much. My laptop went tappity-tap. Then I wrote a letter giving me permission to pick up her driver’s license. I went to TCD. I took a number. I watched the silent TV ads for Carnival & walk-in medical care. Then they called her name & I got up.
A name that belongs to a person who existed only on that little piece of pink & blue plastic that TCD gave me then & there.
Until I tappity-tapped a little more. Then I collected her authentic birth certificate from the Registrar General. All they had to do was print out a duplicate of the one she never had.
She? You know I’m not that stupid, book. Let’s say the name I made up & tappity-tapped is Seabird. Let’s just say. Now let’s say I fill out a couple forms & take a picture & send the forms to England. Then a passport comes in the mail.
Let’s pretend it says Seabird. Now pretend it’s my picture.
I can now go anywhere in the world, leaving Nabilah Simone Robinson-Furbert & all her sins & man-troubles behind. & it’s all authentic, everything. These days you don’t need a body to be somebody. All you need is a couple pieces of paper. & make sure you’re in the computer.
Now, that’s enough. I feel better now, don’t I.
Zohytin is pure hydrocodone. One pill is equivalent to a handful of Vicodin. Zo is most effective when broken into pieces and consumed a little at a time. Taken simultaneously, two pills could send a juvenile or unconditioned system into respiratory failure.
Some years ago a broken arm landed me in Cambridge Hospital’s ER. The Vicodin they gave me brought no relief at all, cursed at birth as I was with an unnaturally high tolerance for narcotics. Cocaine’s as exciting as stale flour; Hallelujah and Empyreal only make me sneeze; a keg of vodka couldn’t give me so much as a snicker. So, tormented by my shattered limb and a growing roster of clients who wallowed in euphoria while I stood by and suffered, I sought advice from a colleague, a pharmacist at one of Boston’s leading hospitals. This colleague recommended Zohytin, having personally conducted multiple experiments. And relief from misery is joy, however fleeting it may be!
My colleague and I came to an arrangement involving Zo, Empyreal, and not-for-resale licenses. We conduct our annual transactions when Nabi sends me to New Jersey for paper clips and envelopes, whose dirt-cheap prices make the Land of Milk and Honey the Land of Milk and Honey. I volunteer for these Atlantic hops, breathing not a word of my northern side-trips.
Weeks may pass in which Hardy’s Collected Works sit unopened in the library. When Martin goes on back-to-back excursions. In reckless stolen days when our love overpowers Nabi’s conscience. But those days are outnumbered. A quarter-pill takes the edge off. Double it and there might be the possibility of laughter.
While studies show that the body begins to depend on potent opiates after a week or two of consistent use, hydrocodone, if overzealously consumed, can bring unpleasantness. My attempt to commit to an all-consuming addiction, when I moved back to Bermuda and realized certain things undeniably and far too late, was thwarted by just such unpleasantness. It’s probably just as well, since addiction practically guarantees brushing up against withdrawal (one’s supplier takes an inconvenient vacation etc.), and withdrawal from Zohytin is worse than anything in the nine circles of hell.
I told Doreen I was curious about the box but hungover and thinking about calling in sick. I’ve never been hungover in my life. Truth is I was high. I thought Doreen sounded scrumptious. I thought a hangover sounded awesome. Myrtle’s box had all the excitement of a gambling cruise. But it had been a while since I’d taken so much Zo. It made me feel a little sick, which only served to remind me that the current niftiness of things was artificial, so I still considered putting a pillow over my face. The thought made me titter but defeated the purpose of being high. Defeat makes me angry, so there you go.
“I hear Empyreal is good for this kind of thing.”
“Coffee’s better,” she said. “I’ll come over.”
“Nah. It’ll take forever on the bus.” I didn’t want her in my place. I said, “I’ll come to you.”
“You don’t want to drive like that.”
“Sure I do.”
“Let me guess. You told her what we did. Already.” Doreen sniggered like a roll of thunder.
“It wasn’t like that. In fact it’s none of your business. In fact I never said there was anyone to tell. So where the fuck you get off to, thinking you know something—”
That made her laugh. The sound drove me right into a fury. I hung up on her, threw on clothes, threw a shoe when I remembered that Nabi had stolen my car, threw myself on my old moped—which I hadn’t ridden since I’d purchased the MG, I was just lucky the Yamaha had gas and hadn’t rusted—barreling eastward, I almost nodded off thanks to Zo, and that made me fackin mad since it meant I really was pathetic. It was at the roundabout in Paget; my head dipped and the bike wobbled, old Johnny Barnes jerked me awake, probably saved my life with his plangent voice. Waving his spindly arms at every Tom, Manuel, and Lolita who drove by, waving his boater, hollering to hoots and toots of gratitude, “Good morning everybody I love you morning morning I love you everybody!” Not crazy, I don’t think, just a self-made institution, a remnant of Bermuda’s glory days like a patch of pink paint on a ruined house; a whirling fixture at that roundabout since before I was born. I wanted to shout, Der in’t nothin good about it, yah fackin wuffless fackin bimpert! But I was busy speeding and trying to keep my balance, so when I got to St. George’s I was riled indeed. Doreen came out of Aetna’s cottage wearing a sports bra and skintight little exercise shorts. I pushed her back inside and tried to throw her on the card table, which would’ve been stupid. She shoved me into the bedroom where I crushed her against the dresser, she pushed back and slammed me into the armoire, we sort of ricocheted onto the bed.
As we bumped around and moaned, Zo drew fuzzy pillowcases over the sensations, causing me to push Doreen harder, making my thoughts flutter and burst like roving blisters. I kept seeing Aetna Simmons at the Unfinished Church: the ruin that had never been other than a ruin, a gathering of incomplete arches and columns, gray limestone with weeds eking out a weedy life between the blocks. Windowless, abandoned, sky for a roof, and walls that never meet. Forsaken on a hill not far from where Doreen and I gorged on each other like adolescent vampires. Aetna was on her back, draped over the stub of a plinth like Tess at Stonehenge. She wore the pale linen of the damned, her black hair whipped her face in spirals, curling not like Nabi’s soft loose waves but in tight springs that wound about her to her waist. She looked up at a flash of lightning, defiant eyes blacker than the angry sky. A storm roiled in her irises, growing vast and violent as she lay straining against it, keeping it at bay while it grew inside her with the urge to scream and at the same time all around her as the suffocating emptiness of death; her twisting turni
ng into writhing as the struggle overcame her and when she opened her mouth the storm came out, cracking the sky with a ravenous roll of thunder. Water exploded from her, the ocean itself gushing over her as she arched in agony, water and more water, the entire savage Atlantic made rabid by the storm—and I knew, when she was spent, she’d rise up and walk into that merciless ocean, straight-backed and steady. Before she went she looked at me, seeming to know more than anyone would ever know. She shook her head as if to say, It is a waste, what can we do, nothing for it but to be brave and let it go. And off she went, down and down forever. She never so much as lifted a hand to me. Yet the eldritch strength that clasped me to Doreen seemed to come from Aetna and the sea, not Doreen’s kickboxer-legs. I pushed my face past hers into the mattress underneath us. When I gasped I devoured the fragrance of the dead.
We walked to St. George’s Square. I was coming down and none too happy about it. The air was muggy, which didn’t help. We sat outside Gojo’s with a pot of tea, expediting a coincidence that would decimate my world.
Doreen seemed fixated on a family of tourists who played with the stocks on the far side of the square. The kids put the parents in the stocks and took a picture. Then the kids went in the stocks.
I asked about Myrtle’s cedar box. Doreen harrumphed. She’d come into a windfall, and she was unimpressed. Cool as a cactus. This was dangerous. At the time I found it as thrilling as it was chilling. Which just goes to show.
Some fifty years ago, Myrtle opened an account at Bank of Butterfield. She started with a quarter-million dollars. Doreen had never seen a penny of that money, never known of its existence till the locksmith cracked the box.
Throughout Doreen’s childhood, Myrtle was a cleaning woman for St. George’s Town Hall and St. Peter’s Church; her bank statements corroborated this. Forty years ago she moved the bulk of her savings to CAM, which did extremely well by her. Couple years later she retired after a quarter-century of mopping. Even then she barely touched her savings. Lived almost forty years off the income from her rental property.
Drafts of a Suicide Note Page 15