Suicide Academy

by Daniel Braun Stern

  Solomon closed his sermon—a lay sermon was what it was, every member of the Fellowship being a Rabbi—with five minutes of silence. It was purgatory for me. If I had not been bursting with pride in my father I could not have borne it at all. I fidgeted like mad; shifted my weight from foot to needling foot. Finally, failing to catch the eye of any of my friends with my own conspiratorial eye, I looked out at the great curve of the Bay, swooping away from the sea in a dramatic arc. I was not merely bored with the five-minute silence. I was troubled. Perhaps my father had discovered my eight-year-old dialogue with the sky. I shivered a little in the hot August sun. Later I told Solomon of my fears. He laughed and told me I was the only one who had understood his sermon. He gave me a quarter for it which I spent on the cotton candy they sold in a store near the beach.

  My eloquent father remained a widower, permanently. His main preoccupations were the Fellowship, my education—and protection—and his work for the local of the Teamsters’ Union which he had helped organize. Driving his truck to the produce markets of Miami, Nashville and Memphis, he supported us. The surplus he donated to charity. Himself he donated to the struggle for justice to the teamster. His father, too, had been a teamster, in Odessa. There the internal combustion engine was the horse. But the injustice had been the same. Barely enough to eat while you had the brawn to fight the horses, the cobblestoned streets and the no-good kids who tried to steal your cargo. Then when you were too old or took sick—onto the cobblestones and someone else could drive your team of horses. His son, Solomon, never forgot this. It killed him, finally, while still a young man. I saw him die. And if anything kills me while still a young man or saves me, for that matter, it will be that sight. The children had always been protected from death. We were not only not allowed to attend funerals, we were not told of the existence of death. Of course, in oblique ways we knew of it. Books spoke of death. But when it never comes close—when people just “go away”—it has an insubstantiality that allows you to manipulate your feelings about it, rather than the reverse. My best friend had “gone away” at the age of eleven. It was sad—but not desperate. Even sicknesses were handled in an indefinite way, to protect the children.

  Thus the background to my witnessing my father’s murder. He was on a picket line during the famous teamsters’ strike of the ’forties. They were marching around the headquarters of a trucker in Tampa who stubbornly refused to recognize the union: as they trudged they chanted some rhythmic slogan. It was a hot August day and I had been allowed to drive up with my Uncle Joseph to go to my first movie. Until sixteen, movies were not allowed us. I would then be driven home by my father when his turn on the picket line was up. (Joseph was not a relative. All the older men in the community were called “Uncle” by all the kids.)

  My father’s death occurred swiftly, mysteriously, like the spark in a flash fire, the exact cause of which defies discovery forever. There was a scuffle, some shouts; one man fell; some horses’ hooves got involved; then my father was lying on the ground bleeding, it seemed, from his pepper-gray hair.

  Uncle Joseph whisked me away swiftly. But not swiftly enough. The whole thing had collapsed. I don’t think I’ve ever understood anything as simply and profoundly since that day. I struck through the web of responsibility—the tangle of social pressures—the uniform—(to confuse things further, the cries of “kike” from the policemen). All of it allowed of no doubt. I saw the fragility of skin, the easy availability of blood. I saw that my father’s breathing had been a lie in its very casualness. It had always been temporary—Gods and men both waited to choke it off. It was only a question of who got there first. Like Buddha, I realized with shock what a terrible lie my happy, hermetic childhood had been. Where had all the pain, misery, cruelty and death been those sad and marvelous years? Waiting for me—like the snow I never saw until my eighteenth year.

  During the next year I lived with Uncle Joseph and his family. I was a sixteen-year-old secret traitor in the community. I knew the truth, so I merely endured. My passionate interest in studies vanished. I walked through them just to keep the adults happy. I listened to the eternal aphorisms with unvoiced skepticism. I knew better. This attempt to make sense made no sense. That was clear.

  I am not a prisoner of any trauma theory. I know that the one event, no matter how awful, can never determine the future course of a life. I had always been a subtly estranged child. Once, at the age of seven, I’d said to my father, “I feel unreal, Da.”

  “Unreal. You mean not real—like other people?”

  “I don’t know. Just unreal.”

  As always, he countered it with a teaching. You are only as real as you make other people think you are. Except when you are alone. And you are always alone. This sort of thing contributed to my growing up as a thinking animal—but not exactly a secure one.

  Max had been right in his contemptuous comment about my “crazy childhood” leading to the Academy. But it was not a straight or simple line. The day after I turned eighteen I left the community. Whether they couldn’t find me, or never tried, I do not know. Perhaps it was covered by some obscure epigram: The day a child runs away is the day he stops being a child. And who chases after a runaway man?

  Out in the world, in this case New York City, I was faced with the problem of what to do for money. All of the interests I had developed as a child—geology, sociology, science—all had been postponed with the inevitable: “That you’ll pursue further in college.” Now I was the pursued, not the pursuer. The first thing I did was drive a truck. I had, after all, been driving my father’s truck around town since I was fourteen. That didn’t last long. The irony of it was too flat to the taste. I was a clerk in an insurance company for a time; then a private investigator for a company that checked up on other company’s employees. I performed many of the non-jobs done by people who live entirely in the present with respect to their occupation. Only at night do their personal lives pick up the thread of continuity. But here I differed. I kept that as abstract and non-continuous as my jobs. Until I met Jewel.

  That happened during one cold winter—my twentieth—when I took a job as manager of a winter stock company in Pennsylvania. It was actually a menial position, but I liked the sound of it: one can see already the future Director of the Suicide Academy.

  One night an actor became ill. In desperation I played his part. (We could not afford paid understudies. We counted on actors in robust health, a kind of pre-Blue Cross health roulette.)

  Acting was a profound shock. I knew, the instant I began to move and speak as an imaginary person, that I had discovered the sequel to the first shock that had so disarranged my sense of life four years earlier, my father’s bloody death.

  Acting! From a minimal life confined in my doomed skin I was suddenly born into a hundred, a thousand lives: as many as there were parts. Standing there in makeup for the first time in my life, I felt myself in the middle of time. I understood why there are clocks backstage. I threw myself into acting with a frenzy. Ten parts in seven weeks. I knew what had been bothering me. The normally extreme ambitions of youth had been aggravated by the abnormal upbringing my father had subjected me to. Death! If I couldn’t not die, what was the use of living? If I couldn’t be everybody—then I was nothing. But an actor is everybody and nothing. For the first time I understood the awful banality of the actors I knew, those I’d been living with since becoming the manager of the company. They were so directed toward the temporary, the present tense of their art, they had no presence left for mere living. Those that seemed to were only using mannerisms that ring true on stage and are hollow as a bell off stage. But what a magnificent company I joined when I began to act. Only actors could live in that imaginary world my father’s sect had tried to create. In the theater everything exists in the present; all human action is a moral parable the meaning of which is not quite clear—or at best is ambiguous. (Even the most learned of critics disagree.) And the success of an attempt is immediately apparent, as is the f
ailure. There is no need to wait for the ultimate outcome of a revolution. You play “Danton’s Death” and by the end of the evening, history has brought in its judgment. The next morning the critics guillotine history. Best of all, though, what I felt as liberation was the conjunction of myself on the stage and the people in the audience. I would cover in the small space of an evening what they would have to live an entire lifetime to find out. And even better, the next evening I could do it again—and again—and again ad mortuum. It was a kind of immortality. The superficiality of the society and the boredom of the daylight hours seemed a small price to pay.

  I began to have strange dreams—full of masks that spoke like people and people who looked like masks. Children who died of old age; old men and women romping like children. I traveled across centuries and continents in seconds. This carried over into the oddest, most omnipotent daytime life I have ever had. Not that I felt immortal. On the contrary. Two and a half hours sufficed for a life.

  I met Jewel when I played Petruchio to her Katharina. I was tamed at once. How could I have known the desperate lack of form that lay within that beautiful form? I, the supreme artist of choice, fell instantly in love with a beautiful Jewel absolutely incapable of choosing.

  14

  MY OFFICE WAS A temporary refuge of sanity and control. Here there were specific tasks to be performed. My secretary had gone over a list of medical supplies that had been received and had to be paid for. The check was IBM’d and awaited only my signature and the countersignature of Mr. Brand. The laundry had lost an entire shipment of sheets. The Academy Doctor wanted to see me on a “personal matter.” Personal usually meant financial: anything from a request for a small advance to a raise.

  Leona, my secretary, was a tiny Negro girl—the Academy was an “equal opportunity employer”—of extraordinary efficiency and taciturnity. She laid the papers before me in the proper order, giving me the proper time to scan before she moved on to something else.

  “Mr. Gilliatt left a message,” she said. “There’s a discrepancy in the clocks. The one in the Guide’s Quarters is off.”

  Damn! It was the wrong day to forget a detail like that. Gilliatt’s black book would profit by it. “Did he say anything else?”

  “He said it was being attended to.”

  Leona, you dark Sphinx, I thought, stop being so perfect. What I want is nuance, not accuracy. What is Gilliatt up to today? How will he use a small error against me? But I had hired her for the very impersonality that frustrated me now. I distracted myself with details. I knew that at any moment I was going to bolt for the door and dash out to where Max was filming the morning’s activities with the cool compliance of Gilliatt. But distraction worked both ways. I was distracted from the details with which I was trying to divert my attention. Drifting into my mind came fragments from the early morning. Max and Jewel spies? Suicides? What motives? Perhaps Max was the reject from one of the other Academies? Just to do something that felt purposeful I put in a call to the Central Exchange. I gave them the basic data on Max and Jewel and requested intelligence. Then I ordered the off-duty guides to snow clearance duty and comforted myself with a cup of tea, convinced for the moment that I had done something useful. The shapeless horrors were held at bay once more. Action, even meaningless action, contradicts the pointlessness of things like snow, the mystery of things like singing dreams.

  15

  TODAY I’M FED UP. It’s raining and cold. In the damp gloominess I saw today’s group as the bunch of damned vicious murderers they are. They come here to kill. It doesn’t matter whom—themselves, or others. And it doesn’t matter if they lose their nerve or genuinely change their minds. The original intent is murder.

  16

  THE DRAMA HALL. GILLIATT was taking a group of nine guests through the exercise. He sat on the stage with a prompt book open on his lap. It contained the crucial information about each of them. God knows what the Academy’s guests thought when confronted by this lean, elegant Negro whose slouching body, aristocratic face and supple voice were capable of all styles indicated: indifference, hostility, boredom, impatience or sheer snottiness. The Southerners, in particular, were often an amusing study.

  In the orchestra Max prowled around like a cat whose one eye could record reality. Jewel sat frozen in her white costume, watching. Barbara stood at the side of the Hall feeding the guests one by one onto the stage. They were silent. Except for the whirr of Max’s hand-held movie camera, the Hall was quiet.

  I sat down next to Jewel. She looked at me. Instead of a smile (smiling means death through aging wrinkles) she arched her eyebrows in a visual greeting I remembered well.

  “I have to talk to you,” I whispered.

  “Not now, Wolf,” she said.

  Gilliatt had pressed a button and on a screen above the stage appeared the words: Lewis Griswold—farmer—age seventy-one—cancer. Long ago the Academy had decided that no one valid “reason” for suicide could ever be isolated. Thus all reasons were equally valid. The official in charge—today it was Gilliatt—could choose any one of the many possibilities offered by a guest.

  “Why not now?” I said to Jewel.

  She gestured toward Max who was crouching in front of the stage.

  “Are you afraid of pain?” Gilliatt asked the farmer who sat before him. His tone was gentle.

  “You got something there,” the farmer said. “You know it was more the arthritis that brought me here.”

  “I’ll get rid of Max,” I said.

  “Not when he’s filming,” Jewel said. “You couldn’t touch him.” On the screen appeared different words: Fred Jarvis—Marine lieutenant—age thirty—homosexual.

  Gilliatt was brutal. “Were you a fag before you joined up?”

  “The Service is a very anal-oriented life,” the lieutenant said.

  “Shit!” Gilliatt said. “You’re a freak. You were born a queer.”

  “I was seduced … by an older man …”

  “Tell it to the Marines!”

  Jewel stared at me in the semi-darkness.

  “It’s always been done,” I said. “Since long before I came here.”

  “Strange …” she murmured.

  “Jewel,” I said. “Please.”

  Carl Walkowitz (the screen said)—translator—age forty-one—concentration camp survivor.

  “Do you have fantasies of revenge?” Gilliatt asked.

  “Let’s just get on with it,” Walkowitz said.

  “Do you feel you deserve more sympathy than other people?”

  “I am other people.”

  Max was training his camera at the side of the Hall. It looked to me as if it were Barbara who was drawing his eye and his focus. She stood straight and still as a zombie, moving only to usher each new guest onto the stage opposite Gilliatt.

  “I dreamed about you last night,” I said.

  “I’ve dreamed about you sometimes. I wake up sad.”

  “You were singing,” I said. “A Fauré song.”

  “Did I sing well? It’s not what I do best. God, remember my dreams of singing glory?”

  “It’s not that I’ve missed you. I haven’t.”

  “Oh?” She opened her eyes wide in mock surprise.

  “You don’t miss people here. It’s not that kind of place.”

  “I see.”

  “But I kept hearing you singing the word reviens, over and over. Reviens.” Her face gleamed whitely at me.

  The words on the screen said: Joseph Graubart—Rabbi—age thirty-eight—Faith depression. Gilliatt at work, I thought. As senior, as my assistant, he could have his choice in making up a group.

  “Are you Orthodox?”

  “Reform,” the Rabbi said.

  “Do you wear a fringed garment all the time?”

  “No.”

  “When you pray?”

  “No.”

  “Did not God require of Abraham that he do only two things: circumcise male children on the eighth day and wear a fringed
garment as a sign that God had set him apart from other people?”