Debs?
“No. My father.”
What do you think about socialism?
“I cried when Stalin died.”
Why?
“But I cried when he was alive, too.”
What do you think about capitalism?
“I’m always broke.”
Did World War II disrupt the orderly pattern of your life?
“I voted for Eisenhower.”
Do you believe in love?
“I hate love!”
Why?
“Because I never had any as a child. It’s strange to me. And I hate strangers.”
None of it worked. I was pulled backward relentlessly—to the particularity of my own unsmiling love. I struggled against it. There were enough tools at hand to keep my attention occupied. An afternoon concert, the indoor swimming pool, the Rorschach room—I could follow my beloved charges into a multitude of places and actions.
There was a writer (blocked) who interested me. A frail-looking blond man who kept muttering something about summer—at least that’s what it sounded like. And a young woman (occupation: housewife) whose husband, a psychiatrist, had run off with one of his patients. She was humming a melody under her breath; her voice had a gentle sweetness, quite rare. I felt the old tug and counter-tug of involvement and detachment at play. But it was playing itself out at a remove. Jewel’s snowfield of a face stared out at me from behind my eyes. For the first time in three years I felt lonely.
At least, for the moment I was free of the goading Gilliatt. Max and Jewel and their film were his main assignment of the day. Then, en route to the cafeteria I ran into Max. I glanced at my watch. It was 2:30. I’d managed to kill two and a half hours. But it hadn’t been easy.
Max was setting up his movie camera on a tripod outside of the cafeteria.
“You won’t get much action there,” I said.
He turned and looked at me as if I were an idiot or a child.
“I’m not after action,” he said. “I’ll leave that to you. I want whatever happens.”
“I just meant that you won’t find many people here at this hour.”
“Then the camera,” he explained patiently, “will see that—and that will be its truth.”
“Where’s Gilliatt?”
“He’s helping Jewel bring the sound equipment.”
Knowing precisely what I was doing, I said, “Okay—but there won’t be much sound around here.”
He smiled. It was not a pleasant thing to see. “Then we’ll call it the silence equipment,” he said, and changed direction. “That was a wild scene out there.”
“Yes.”
“I mean this place is something—your friend, Gilliatt—”
“My arch-friend. He’s a combination of arch-enemy and Archangel. Come on. I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”
We sat at the counter and drank from our cups. Max probably expected my question. But I didn’t expect it of myself. Not at that moment, anyway.
“Why didn’t Jewel have an abortion?” I asked.
Ito, the counter man, a Japanese fellow who’d come as a guest and stayed on as a member of the staff, broke into a spasm of sneezes, as if my question had startled him into an allergic attack.
“We don’t live that way—me and Jewel,” Max said.
I was surprised. A moralistic defense from Max Cardillo? “How do you mean?”
He spun off his seat unexpectedly and stood behind me. I was forced to whirl around on my revolving seat to see him. It was probably accidental, but he was directly in line with the humming camera that was operating where he had set it up, just outside the door of the coffee shop. Max was, whether he knew it or not, filming himself.
“I mean we’re alive, not dead.”
“?”
“I mean we take it as it comes … I mean we don’t play around with everything until there’s absolutely no life left in it … I mean …” His unexpected agitation was breaking his speech apart again. I was sorry I’d started him off. I was in no position to weather any dramatic storm from Max. The day was stormy enough.
“You mean,” I said, “that you can’t interfere—when a woman gets knocked up? You’re kidding. Or else you want the kid and Jewel—”
“Accept, you idiot! The whole thing is to accept.”
Jewel’s pale face before me, I said, “It’s easy for you to accept. She has to have the kid.”
“She can do what she wants. She’s accepting too.” He made a wild gesture of embracing. I thought, what did I let Jewel in for when I let her go to him!
Reaching into his inside coat pocket, Max pulled out a metal flask and drank from it.
“Max,” I said. “There’s no liquor allowed here.”
“Medicinal,” he grunted. The flask was returned to its resting place. “You know,” he said, “you make me laugh … with our prescribed indifference … man, you are so hung up on differences … your buddy would call that a Jewish hang-up … I’m going to explain something to you…. About six months after Jewel checked in with me I checked into this sanatorium … I was too far out this time for drugs … so they gave me electric shock … what happened was—I died.”
“You what?”
“D-i-e-d. Medically, legally, spiritually, every which way …”
I caught a whiff of his breath: the sweet smell of oxidized alcohol; it wasn’t the result of one swig. Yet I hadn’t smelled it during our morning encounter in the TV viewing room. He must have started since. Gilliatt? Hold it. Suspicions become paranoia too easily.
“You don’t have to take my word for it…. You can check Doctor Nicholas Pollikoff at the Sweetside Sanatorium. He’ll tell it to you in the purest medical prose. The coma that follows electric shock usually lasts about a half-hour. Respiration is hardly noticeable … then normal breathing returns … the patient regains control of his limbs…. This time …” He paused.
In spite of myself I was fascinated. “It didn’t happen?” I said.
“The body … my body … was in a taut state … you couldn’t tell if from rigor mortis.… Twenty minutes later they had me on a slab … shoving me around like a piece of dead meat—which, of course, I was … one elongated erection … stiff!” He was weaving around in parodistic acting-out of his various adjectives. Ito was staring wide-eyed from behind the coffee bar. “I had been hung-up with Jewel on a lot of things before I flipped out. She was dragging everything out of me … and nothing was going back in … all the cool was gone … I was making machines then … not movies … machines to make love to other machines … machines made to die…. Then I flipped out all on my own … then there was the shock and I died … but what I wanted to tell you was what I found out when I was dead … because you, Wolf, you of all people should know what I found out…. The birds, God, the birds of nothing sitting on big stones … no, Wolf,
I’ll tell it
my way,
broken up,
The unfree verse
of my unlived life,
What I saw,
Everything intersecting,
Everything crossing points
With everything else,
A blue network of hidden
Veins—and sometimes a red
Network of open veins …
Meanwhile poor Doctor Pollikoff
Was having my body moved
To the morgue
Where bodies belong …
And I was hovering
And shivering
Full of shame
Because I had
Wanted to change …
And I could see now
That there was no change …
Because the electricity
That was still
In my body
Had been gathered
For years and years
In blue fields
Of electricity
Just to enter
My body
And free my mind
For eternal death �
�
But while the doctor looked
I was pouring inward
In flames,
Torn apart with longing
For that stiff piece of meat
That always gave me
Trouble,
With its fucking desires
To put it in
Every woman alive
So I would feel
Alive. Automatically
Alive, Jewel
Called it, but it was
My body and whoever’s,
Too, and now there
Was so much distance
Between us
Vast, like the playground
The first morning
My mother took me
And left me there
Alone, vast, it was
And I stretched toward it
With such pain,
Such a cracking of bones
And heart,
O God,
How to get to it
And be one again—
Please Wolf,
Do not understand me
Too quickly …
I was in agony.
Horrible pain of separation …
Then, suddenly, my eyes
Pulled back
The way a camera
Pulls back
To fill in
The perimeters of a scene
And I saw the sun
Right next to the moon
In the same segment
Of sky
And I saw the negative
Of everything, I saw
Silence—
(It was blue) and the absence of flesh
And no mountains
Like the Nebraska plains
Where I was born …
I saw the silence
Of all things, I saw
The truth—this:
Everything is silence …
That there is no dialogue
Only magnificent monologues
That intersect, crossing everywhere
And never being heard
(And two people
Living together
Is the master monologue
Of the world
Masquerading as
The dual-control dialogue
Of the universe)
And I began to laugh.
I stopped my noisy hunting
My noisy striving
Toward my self
(My body)
And I began to laugh,
Thinking to myself,
Suspended as I was
In a dry solution
Of nothing,
While I laughed,
My great discovery:
Morior, ergo sum!
I die, therefore I am!
It was true, Wolf,
Do you hear me?
The fact that we die
Proves that everything is good …
Babies and abortions …
Suns and moons …
Silence and music …
(Do not understand me
Too slowly, either.)
I saw the insane,
Divine equalness
Of everything
And with one
Graceful flourish
I gave up my struggle
To re-unite with my body
With my life.
Of course, I was
Put back together
In one piece,
Immediately Doctor Pollikoff
Said: Amazing!
It was the beginning
Of my life
As an artist,
The flow is forever,
And all you have to do
Is accept
So I accept.”
From the right of the whirring camera I saw Jewel and Gilliatt appear. They carried two large boxes piled one on the other between them.
“And Jewel accepts. We don’t
Plan and make and choose
And spoil.
We accept. Does that
Answer your question, about films and art …
About babies and abortions,
Wolf? Does it?”
Max’s mop of brown hair was plastered over his forehead with sweat. I saw Jewel take in his condition with a wide-eyed glance. She dropped her end of the boxes. It made a thunderous boom. Max had performed a mad, silent ballet for myself and his camera. The sound equipment had arrived at last.
I glanced at my watch. It was three o’clock. The one-hour rest period was about to begin.
2
HELLO, I SAID. SHE turned her perfect face to me, then turned away again. She said nothing.
I watched the column of that flawless throat: not a quiver of acknowledgment.
‘I gather you’d rather not talk.’
Ah, a quiver; but no more than that. A thought crossed my mind. Perhaps she couldn’t talk: a mute.
That was a possible explanation for her presence here, too. Instinctively I felt this was so.
‘What is this,’ I said, ‘some kind of trick? Putting a beautiful woman here to wait with me … subtle propaganda to change my mind. Beauty triumphant.’
She seemed to inch away, unnoticeably. But I wasn’t going to be thrown off. ‘I’ll stop if you tell me your name.’
She turned to me, then, with a look of such pleading that I was ashamed. The Director’s arrival saved me. He carried a tray on which was a cocktail shaker and four glasses. Behind him trailed a tall Negro whose face was a battlefield marked by pock-mark craters.
3
EXTRAORDINARY DISCOVERY: THERE ARE language tutors, a barber, a riding academy and an infirmary here. This is an actual community—with, however, a large transient population.
4
“IS THAT TIGHT ENOUGH?” I asked her.
Jewel nodded. I began to lace up the other skate, squinting along the brilliant blade winking in the sunlight. As I knelt before her I laced slowly and deliberately, pulling the white cotton firmly through the eyes of the skates. I was pulling the day, my crucial day, together with each movement. Crouching on the snow-spackled wooden floor that rimmed the rectangular ice skating rink I was taking a pause to understand: that would be my rest period. Max was lying in the room to which Gilliatt and Jewel had taken him; the guests were resting in their assigned rooms, or making love in their self-assigned rooms and beds. The skating expedition had been my idea. I knew it would be impossible for me to regain control of the day unless I settled Jewel once and for all. So we had tucked Max in, with the aid of a tranquilizer; I’d removed his flask of whiskey, as a safety precaution; and we’d headed for the rink. The snow had stopped as whimsically as it had stopped and started all day, and the sun was yellowing the white that everywhere met the eye.
A set of words from the Fellowship of my childhood came to mind. God’s will is man’s will—therefore the will is to be honored above the emotions. All right, I thought. One hour for the emotions and then I will return to the clarity of the will. That was, however, a hopeful guess. At the moment my head buzzed with remnants of Max’s tirade. He had tossed at me, in one wild outburst, everything I’d come to the Academy to escape. The random horror, chance … All swallowed up and vomited out by Max in a mystique from beyond the grave. I shook it off. Nonsense! If there was one thing you learned from seeing all the similarities among the endless stream of suicides arriving every day it was their differences. Max’s divine equality was a lie. Or rather, it was a myth—an attractive lie. His acceptance was unacceptable to me. Like Gilliatt’s mythical image of me as the eternal Jew. It was a day for myths.
Jewel was speaking to me over my head and my thoughts.
“—place is like a winter resort.”
“Summer, too,” I said. “We have the ocean then.”
“Was this what you were heading for all along?” she asked.
“My youth wasn’t wasted,” I said. “It died in a good cause. It led me here.” I finished her skate and sat down nex
t to her on the wooden bench to put on my own.
“You’re still young, Wolf.”
Jewel stood up and clumped around a few steps on her skates. She waved her arms for balance.
“It’s been a while,” she said. “I hope I can still do it.”
“It’s like making love,” I said. “It comes back to you no matter how long you’ve been away.” I studied her from over the tops of my upraised skates. There was something disturbingly familiar about the way she was moving—a certain detached deliberateness, a kind of false poise that troubled me. I couldn’t quite place it; yet I was certain it was not an association from our time together.
Never mind, I thought. One hour more and I’ll get hold of Barbara and shape her up or discharge her before she can infect anyone else with her despair. I’ll prepare my defense for the Board of Management meeting; I’ll finish dictating my plan for the expansion of the research facilities and my memo about the trading of annual results with the other Academies. One more hour and I would be myself again: Wolf Walker. And Gilliatt would know it—or else!
I hadn’t scratched the surface of what there was to be done, theoretically and practically. I had been preparing a paper for some time on the relativity of suicide. Everywhere there were people living out their lives using aspects of suicide against themselves. They did not even have the authenticity of the final act to speak for them. Suicide is, in short, the one continuous, every-day, ever-present problem of living. It is a question of degree. I’d seen them all in varying stages of development and despair. The failed lawyer, the cynical doctor, the depressed housewife, the angry teen-ager … all of mankind engaged in the massive conspiracy against their own lives that is their daily activity. The meaning of suicide, the true meaning, had yet to be defined, had yet to be created in the broad dimensions it deserved.
Suicide was a grand, dark continent to be charted and I was its cartographer. That was part of my task. I would not let this personal diversion, troubling as it was, destroy it for me! Like all explorers I would be passionate but objective. I would allow myself this hour of rest from my vocation. But I would have to use it well so it would free me (and Jewel?) to go back to my own constricting freedom. How much I was whistling in the dark for my own benefit can be seen by the fact that, on impulse, I pulled out Max’s confiscated flask and took a long pull. It didn’t taste like whiskey, but something that went down much smoother—kind of a gentle gin, if such a thing can be imagined.
Jewel paused long enough in her test-steps on the ice to comment, “I thought there was no drinking allowed.”
Suicide Academy Page 8