It is not without its dangers, though, this delicate balance I achieved. This clear congruence of natural surroundings—to which I may add several species of non-domestic animals: deer, foxes, one or two bears. This union between us under an abstract sky was a union so deep that it may seem, after a while, unnatural—artificial.
At such perilous moments, perhaps after a busy, difficult day, I would stand on the terrace of the Main House watching the moon tickle the fountain into yellow waves and I would feel a deliciously traitorous tranquility, my happiness poisoned by the question: how can one live by the legend everything human is alien to me? Then, of course, Gilliatt would appear, sensitive as always to my discomforts and perplexities, in his role as my arch-friend, tormentor of my peace, punisher of my Jewishness. (I promised you Gilliatt’s entrance, but this is not quite it.) Divining my doubts he would stand there, a half-smile resting on his black jewel of a face. “Nonsense,” he would say. “It’s all protective covering. The Jew is the arch-human. Indifference is out of the question. He needs the most extreme of disguises.” Tall, skinny, his black bony face pock-marked from some childhood illness, Gilliatt would thrust his face next to mine. “Didn’t your God disguise Himself as a Burning Bush? Well—you choose an icy hill or a moonlit fountain. But it’s all for people. Right?” He laughed; in the blue and yellow light of evening, his blackness was a reproach to me, to the moon, to the night.
“What do I need with you?” I wondered aloud.
“And I with you, my good Director,” he replied.
“What are you to me?”
“Every man has his Negro.”
“Does that make me your Jew?”
He shrugged, a pastiche of a Jewish gesture. “Every man has his Jew,” he said. “Therefore choose life.” Another one of his semi-erudite jabs with which he edged me day and night. “The Talmud.”
“Get lost” I said. “Wolf Walker.”
3
THIS TROUBLE ABOUT THE new course was not the first problem of its kind to arise. Running a place like the Suicide Academy you were always coming up against these incredibly subtle areas. Like the time the Board of Management decided that to have music entirely absent from the day was incorrect. Thus it fell to me as the Director to choose the music. To further prove that I was cut out for the executive life, I knew at once what music I wanted. Once in a great while there appears a style in art that is wholly of the present—sensuous, immediate. An art that offers grace through grace. Such a style can never be great. The heroic is alien to it. Just such a style is found in the French music that was being written when my father was a child in Odessa. Major or minor—Debussy or Satie—it is all minor. By which I mean created to the human scale. Intimate, involved with the texture of living, it is music that speaks of sunlight on skin—of a woman’s breasts—of a man’s hands and eyes—of rain. What could be simpler, I thought. No major statements, no Ninth Symphony to affirm transcendental humanity. In fact no crap at all. Just straight living. What could be more honest and objective? Right? Wrong! At least according to the Board of Management. I have a hunch it was Gilliatt who got them steamed up that time, too. But I can’t prove it. Anyway I’d already bought a big stock of the best tapes available. The Board refused to okay the vouchers. Eight hundred bucks worth! That’s no joke, even at my salary level. Fortunately I was able to turn in most of them for full value.
And what was their big gripe? The same old story. French music—Impressionism, they called it, the nudnicks—tended to weight the decision of the “guests.” On behalf of life, just as playing the Dies Irae on Carillon bells would tend to weight it in favor of the deep six. I lost that one. (Though I salvaged a bit of amour-propre: I was allowed to use Debussy’s Nocturnes and Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé. It was judged that these were familiar and thus would not be heard with any great shock of conviction. Also they were program music: not pure. That’s the kind of feinschmecking I’m always up against. I sneak in some of the other stuff, like the Ravel Sonatine for Piano, when I think no one’s listening.)
I’m not complaining, though. I’ve won some, too. In the sexual area, for example. There’s a routine sexual orientation: one half-hour. Just after arrival. It’s been on the schedule since long before I became Director. It seemed to be a pretty conventional session the way it was being run. A guide named Barbara was in charge: a tall, creamy-skinned shiksa. One day I suggested to her that we change the structure of it slightly. You’d have thought I suggested a coup d’état. All I did was to raise the question of laughter. I mean the fashionable way of tying all sexual values up in the big explosion—that’s much too localized. You can’t tell enough about a person’s sexuality that way. Which brings us back to laughter. Everyone is busy testing their own sexual openness, freedom and fulfillment (that comes right from one of Barbara’s canned sessions). But how about their laughter quotient? How free is their laughter? How smooth and then eruptive is the transition from smile to laughter? How often do they laugh? What is the tone of the laugh? Do they ever fake a laugh? Do they, perhaps, sometimes laugh without pleasure? I won that one. Perhaps because it was not decisive. Only informational, you see. Not directly connected with the guests’ ultimate choice. In winning I became Barbara’s lover. It was a cool affair composed of equal parts of independence and involvement. I know you’ll think it’s impossible. (That’s because you’ve never been to the Academy.)
You can see some of the problems of my job. This was where we separated the men from the boys. Here the playactors, the infantile, the masochistic, the sadistic all fall by the wayside—back into life where they belong. Here is where we discover those few who are ready to follow their despairing logic to its logical conclusion. Of course, even the delay of one day between the suicidal urge and the final decision—the foundation of the Academy’s existence—is enough to apparently place us on the side of life. But that is only true for those who were never real candidates in the first place.
It is a delicate operation from start to finish. Not a day went by that didn’t end with my feeling I could have done it better. And if I should forget: there was always Gilliatt.
4
THERE WAS ALWAYS GILLIATT. He met me at the door of my office in the Administration Building.
“Shalom,” he said with a skeletal grin. “It’s shaping up to be a bad day.”
The shalom was his latest needle. His imagination was inexhaustible when it came to the small nudges. I ignored it. “I missed you at breakfast,” I said.
“I ate on the early shift. I’m sodden with virtue.”
“Why?”
“Working since dawn you get to feel that way.”
“I mean: why the bad day?”
“Barbara wants to quit.”
“Why?”
“Post-holiday depression, I would guess.”
“I’ll talk to her after I check the day’s roll. Do we have any reserves?”
“Nobody any good.”
I took the typewritten list from him. Thirty-two. Not too bad. And there were no children. That was good. Children were hard to handle.
Gilliatt seemed to be studying me more intensely than usual. I stared at the list, seeing nothing but abstract print formations. Finally I said: “You’re pressing pretty hard for such an early hour.”
“Never too soon to start,” Gilliatt grinned.
“You son-of-a-bitch, this could be the day I finally fire you.”
“Perhaps. Or it could be another kind of day, entirely.”
I looked at his sly face over the edge of the sheet of paper in my hands. “Don’t you get tired of bringing charges against me?”
“Never. Your fallibility is a passion with me.”
“You never win.”
“The day has just started.”
There was something in his persistence that almost reversed everything. It was not the fool persisting in his folly and becoming wise. There was a mad purity in his extreme ambition to destroy me; to replace me as Director. But
he was not without belief. Anti-Semitism was his religion, and he kept the faith. He wove, incessantly, magnificent, malevolent myths about the Jews. I think the only thing that could have tempted him to suicide would have been the total and permanent absence of Jews from the world.
I handed back the list.
“Haven’t you forgotten something?” He was pacing himself; there was plenty left up his sleeve.
“Okay,” I said wearily, “let’s have it.”
“The couple that are making the movie on the Academy.”
“Today?”
“Today!”
I searched blindly for an out, “Did the Board of Management give final permission?”
“Yes. I arranged it.”
“Why?” I was furious.
“Because I think the film would be a good thing for the Academy.” He stared at me. “You see, Wolf, I care about this place.”
“It may come as a great shock to you, Gilliatt, but I care about it, too.”
“Shit! The whole idea of suicide is absolutely alien to the Jew. You having this job is like a priest working as a pimp for a whore house. It must be eating up your soul.”
I smiled sweetly at him. “No, Gilliatt,” I said. “That’s your exclusive assignment.”
The new day, the new year, was not beginning well.
5
IT WAS THE SILENCE one noticed first; a silence more opaque than he’d ever heard before. The absence of sound was perfect. There was a sweep of trees wherever the eyes fell and a sweet swish of wind on the cheeks; but the leaves gave forth no sounds. Small surprises of birds flashed yellow, red or black among the leaves, appeared and vanished without breaking the stillness.
‘What are you listening for so hard?’ the driver asked. ‘The sea?’
He said nothing and the driver added, ‘When they first started they say it was one of the important questions: sea or forest. The sea wouldn’t have been fair. But if you listen hard you can hear it.’
He heard nothing. ‘Fair?’ he said.
‘There’s something in the sea that pulls; it would have been loading the dice. People have to decide for themselves; you have to leave them be till they do.’
He shrugged. ‘It’s not so long to wait,’ he said. ‘A man can sort of hold his breath for that long.’
The driver grew suddenly familiar, laughed hoarsely and poked a finger in his ribs. ‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘That wouldn’t be fair, either, eh? No, not fair.’ He sniffed deep in his nose, as if he had difficulty breathing.
6
THE COURSE I HAD instituted that was causing me so much trouble was called Actualities of Death. It was a simple, natural conclusion to come to. Only a Gilliatt could see any partiality in it. What it comes down to is this: no one envisions his own moment of death. The moment before—yes! The moment after—ah, delicious! Other people’s grief. One’s own rest—and mysterious ability to observe the mourners. But the agonizing instant—never!
What it is, of course, is violence. I mean, let’s admit the unpleasant fact: blood vessels rupture. Tissues deprived of air do not stay at their best very long. Lungs become choked with fluid. And a man isn’t a fish, no matter how clever or how adaptable he may have been during his lifetime. Even those who use pills or perish of a “quiet” heart attack in their sleep—who knows what the very last spasm communicates in the way of horror, fear, panic and agony? How can breath leave a body peacefully? Maybe it’s my own rebellious nature, but I simply cannot buy that. It’s a terrifying, painful and violent business. And that is what people persist in hiding from themselves.
And that, precisely, is what my course consists of. No Grand Guignol. Just a simple discussion, with slides. Research has shown us that visual aids are very effective. In this case black-and-white slides. Color—that would have given Gilliatt a weapon. Blood and guts to create panic. I was too careful for him. But there it is. How can you honestly claim to guide people, objectively, through the one crucial day when you ignore their blindness on such a point. What we’re after here is real choice. Not compulsive plunging. And I, for one, cannot believe that ignorance is better than knowledge, no matter what the circumstances. (“You Jews,” Gilliatt had said to me, “use knowledge to fight off anxiety, the way we goyim use tranquilizers. As soon as you know something, you feel you can control it. And you’re so damned afraid of everything, you have to know everything. There’s no end to your search for knowledge, because there’s no end to your fear.”)
The course had been in effect since November. Two months—and the graphs showed no particular fluctuation. The percentage of authentic, bedrock suicides remained approximately constant. What gimmick did Gilliatt have hidden up his sleeve that he felt he could get away with bringing me up on charges before the Board? It was true one girl had fainted during the very first lecture. If the expected had happened, things might have gone differently with the course—and perhaps even with Gilliatt and myself. But, oddly, the girl who fainted was dead by the following day. She was the real McCoy. I forget the details of her case—I think it was a rather banal one, postpartum depression. But you have to respect someone with such determination. Even her madness must be respected, if it could survive the shock of a potential violent death so real that it caused a total blackout. And if her madness thrived on such a shock—still, in its extreme logic of persistence it compels my admiration. If that is partiality to death—then I am convicted. Of course, it was precisely the opposite bias I was being accused of.
I was not the first Director to institute changes in the curriculum. Each one had left his individual mark on the place. The founders of the Academy had made sure, however, that the contributions would remain anonymous. No one could pinpoint, for example, the particular Director who was responsible for the advent of the rest period toward the end of the day when men and women—and homosexuals of both persuasions—having either mixed or stayed aloof from each other, were allowed to choose a partner and spend an hour alone together. They might choose a stranger or someone they had come with. They might make love, read, play chess or just sleep or rest. The statistical guess is that the hour had a fifty-fifty chance of turning out well or badly from an emotional point of view. This concept of a temporary relief from the enforced group-life was one of the more brilliant innovations and I wish I knew who had been responsible for it. But he was as anonymous as the author of “Blow, blow thou winter wind.” In the Academy library there is a book of legends about the founders. In one of them the insistence on anonymity is explained by the fact that the founders were a group of men who did not believe in a God, but who desired to rival the God who did not exist by improving on one of the basic situations of His human beings: the tendency toward self-destruction. Obviously no individual credit could be allowed. The goal was to create a group-God who would shame the non-existent deity by handling suicide more justly and more intelligently than He.
The inscription to this book reads: Suicide is not to be undertaken lightly. At its best it is a life-long endeavor.
7
… THEY ALWAYS SAID THE same thing to me or it seemed like the same thing—this is your friend for God’s sake you can depend on him to help—and being lonely can be a good thing you get to think about things a lot—remembering when my mother died in the street felled like an animal by the failure of an organ—think, only think, an organ can drop a whole person—what the hell was the difference she never had all that great of a life anyway everything always being promised and how much of it was delivered—till finally she stopped hoping for much—full of fake philosophy about taking it the way it comes—when I was a kid in school the way music sounded when you heard the chorus practicing like impossible angels then you opened the door and it was just a bunch of kids taking chorus for their second instrument credit besides piano and the younger ones sang all out of tune if you listened carefully—but I never forgot how they sounded through those closed doors—the dirty bastards have been closing doors on me ever since like tellin
g me all right wise guy you think it so beautiful from behind the doors we’ll close them all on you: wife, child, the man you wanted to be—you’ll see how beautiful—afternoons in the cold rain chewing on pity like on a piece of bread—nights shut into your skin remembering all day lies the next day impossible the dragging of ass out of bed horrible the decision to brush the teeth ridiculous the boiled egg on the plate the tie to be tied the first person you meet to have to speak and the closed doors only with no kids singing no angels impossible or possible only noise but I have a trick to play a trick to open doors and not let them shut ever again a trick …
8
THE BELLS IN THE Main House were striking nine o’clock when I arrived at the Guide’s Quarters to see Barbara. The big clock over the doorway was a minute fast. I made a note: tell Gilliatt to have it corrected. There were clocks everywhere these days. I had tried the experiment of eliminating all clocks—of neutralizing time. It was a failure. The unexpected result was panic. The guests had to know where they stood in finite terms. Absence of hours does not simply eliminate time as the natural element: it replaces it with anxiety. Time is the lesser of the evils.
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