Suicide Academy

by Daniel Braun Stern

  I smiled. “If anyone sees me I’ll tell them it’s a mistake.”

  “Mistakes, here?”

  “Why not?”

  “I just can’t imagine a mistake in this place. Can you, really?”

  “I can imagine a mistake,” I said, “up to and including eternity. When the last candle is blown out by the last asthmatic angel there’ll be confusion somewhere—somehow there’ll be an error.”

  “Come and skate and stop being gloomy.” Her style became, for the moment, enticingly feminine. I knew her quickly shifting techniques of old. But there was no need to beware of them now. She was afraid of our being alone—afraid of the moment when the questions would start. I was, too.

  “I’m a Capricorn. Gloomy by temperament.” It was an idle guess.

  “That’s crazy,” she said, and skated back to the bench. She fished in her purse for some of that God-awful printed stuff on astrology that she’d always carried with her. Then, sitting down next to me, she analyzed my personality from the standpoint of where the stars stood at my birth. After that, at my request—I was stalling out of fear—she told my horoscope for this unlikely winter’s day. I didn’t listen. I looked at her lovely, cold-flushed face and reflected on the fact that she was just telling me more lies. They were merely more ambitious, more cosmic lies, formalized. Perhaps she was operating under the assumption that one could lie one’s way to the truth. It was a mathematical assumption. Tell enough permutations of falsehood, and sooner or later you were bound to touch the truth. Sitting there with her I remembered other days and nights. Warm spring nights in the park that hangs over the East River at Beekman Place—when we’d walked up from the Village. Crazy-looking sailboats drifting by … old and elegant matrons walking weary poodles. Doormen drowsing, their daytime arrogance wilted by fatigue. The night-fantasy of the city freed Jewel’s fantasies. She would start with semi-plausible ambitions and move, gradually, into open lies. She would talk about how she wanted to start a little magazine—how she wanted to model in earnest, even though it made her feel foolish—but if she could save enough money, then—And before I knew it she was telling me how her mother had known Truman in Washington at the end of the War; that she’d slept with Dylan Thomas in the White Horse Tavern days; that she’d studied ballet with Massine as a child in Paris. The past and the future were, for her, infinitely plastic; their raw material was desire, their form limited only by imagination. It was the present that drove her crazy. It was there that she had no existence. It was that time span in which she was always begging me to create her, telling all those lies to me, the son of Solomon of the sad smile … who had told me: You are a Jew.… A Jew respects the truth … and the truth is always encased in words … words are the truth …

  When I grew tired of the game I took the papers, stuffed them back into her purse and whirled her out onto the ice. Max’s liquor (whatever it was) was whirling, too, in my blood, giving me an extra touch of grace—or at least the sense of possessing grace—as I tucked Jewel’s arm under mine and began to circle the rink. Suddenly I remembered that the woman my arm carried was herself carrying a child.

  “We’re both crazy,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Suppose you take a fall?”

  “I won’t.” She tossed her head back as she said it. Behind the apparent spontaneity of the gesture was the strange studied quality that had disturbed me earlier. Yet the movement of her head and turning throat was sudden enough for me to remember the wild thing she had been, searching out, in her wandering city, other wild things—wild strawberries in stores too expensive for us—a wild man she met in the park who enchanted her with a few lines of stolen poetry. (It had been Max; stolen poem—stolen wife.)

  Then, as if taking my fears to heart, she pulled heavily on my arm to slow our icy revolutions. We swayed together, to the right, to the left; but it was an awkward rapport. Once I almost tripped as we made a turn. I relinquished her, gently. We skated side by side silently for a moment.

  “I thought Max was here as some kind of spy,” I said. “But now I know that’s not true.”

  “How do you know, Wolf?”

  “Because I think I know why he’s here.”

  “Why?”

  “He came to convince himself to sign in—as a guest. Max is ripe for suicide.”

  “You’re wrong. He came here to do a movie. There was a little extra spice in the project because you were the Director of this place. But that’s the reason he came.”

  She spoke as carefully, as awkwardly, as she moved.

  “And you?” I asked.

  “I go with Max,” she said. “I’m his wife.”

  “You told me you weren’t.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I think I do know.”

  As if by a prearranged signal we stopped skating; my halt was sudden with a sidewise scraping of ice against the blades. Jewel simply turned around twice until she lost enough momentum to come to a full stop. I became aware that there was no music coming over the loudspeaker system. The natural silence of the Academy hung in the frozen air.

  “You came to make your own decision, didn’t you?” Accusation!

  “What do you mean?” Stall!

  “You’re the one with suicide on your mind, not Max.”

  Quite simply, then, she said, “Yes. That’s why I came.”

  “And have you decided?”

  She smiled at me compassionately. “How did you know?”

  “I think it’s the way you moved. I’ve seen it. A kind of holding yourself as if you were afraid you might break. A deliberateness in the way you turn. You, especially, who used to move so suddenly.” I amazed myself at the calmness with which I could discuss Jewel’s impending choice of death. As for her, the fact that it was out in the open seemed to liberate her utterly. She laughed, a free laugh, trailing off into a girlish giggle.

  “I thought you were so hung up on Max you’d never guess about me.”

  “No,” I said. “Max has always been crazy and suicidal. But he’s not the real thing. I’m not sure you are either.”

  “We’ll see about that, old friend,” she grinned. Then she took my arm and pressing herself close to me began to pull me along with her. I smelled a heated scent of fruity perfume, unnatural and exciting in the snowy afternoon cold.

  As if freed by her confession, we loped out onto the ice like a team of fugitive figure skaters who had forgotten how to describe the classic figures and so were inventing new ones. Was there a figure Z? I’m sure we created one. Or a figure R2? I’m sure we invented it.

  A wind sprang up to help us in our gyrations. Jewel laughed at our near-falls, shaking her long hair out of the white bandana that had confined it. While our bodies whirled my mind was in a flap. I would have to condense all the activities of the Academy into one session with Jewel in order to save her. In a way I was responsible. As inconclusive as she had been, as lost, she had never been that far gone. She had caught it from Max. (There had been much investigation done at the Academy on suicide as a contagious disease, but nothing definitive had ever been worked up.)

  One of the circuit points on my mind’s whirl was anger. I was furious at being forced into this breach of faith. Only that morning, walking to my office, I had been furious at having that faith challenged. And what of those clean hills and trees and our unspoken pact of silence and neutrality? But I was helpless. Only by winning Jewel away from her choice could I ever get my own freedom back. I was convinced, for the moment, of the purity of my motives toward her. My theory of psychology that fitted the moment was one that violated the conventional psychoanalytic one. You know they say when you have an extreme anxiety over someone close to you being hurt or dying—the story is supposed to be you’re being hostile underneath the anxiety. Well, I believed that all right, as far as it went. What I really believed was that beneath that—beneath the false anxiety—is a real hostility—but that beneath that real hostility is a real anxiety and bene
ath that—a false hostility beneath which is a false anxiety—and so on down, down, down. Duality is thy name, blessed be the fruit of thy duality, forever and ever. Amen!

  Jewel did not leave me much leeway for anger. Her laughter was infectious; her sudden conversion to high spirits by confessing her intention to me had a powerful charm. She slowed down and leaning on me said, breathlessly, “What is the word for a bunch of skaters, Wolf? Remember the word game?”

  I remembered. “A grace of skaters?” I ventured.

  “Not bad. Not as good as some of the old ones. Young girls—”

  I remembered. “A flurry of young girls,” I said. “Philosophers …”

  “A ponder of philosophers.” She remembered, too, and added, “Jews …”

  “A wander of Jews.”

  “What’s the word for a group of suicides?”

  “There is none.”

  “Wolf—”

  “Yes?”

  She’d slowed us down almost to a standstill. “Could I have some of that stuff in Max’s flask?”

  I made an instant decision; I needed her disarmed. I uncapped it and she drank. My first step, before I got to real Academy curriculum, was to shake her up. Bring just enough reality into the prospect—into the whole matter—to frighten her. The deeper questions of life or death could be turned to later in case she couldn’t be shaken. She breathed a perfumed breath at me, perfumed over now with the scent of alcohol. I refused to allow it to excite me. I began.

  “All you get is a day, you know.”

  “That’s all anybody gets. In a day you can skate—”

  “Laugh.”

  “Fly.”

  “Screw.”

  “Buy a dress.”

  “Rob a bank.” I paused. One for Jewel. I’d gotten caught up in her feeling, not vice versa. “If you let yourself think about it, you know, it’s an awful responsibility,” I said.

  “Responsibility?”

  “To everybody else. The ones who lived before and the ones who are going to live afterward.”

  For a second she seemed sobered. “Nobody’s going to live afterward.”

  “Yes they are.”

  “But I won’t know it.”

  “Then everything ends with you.”

  “I guess so. Too bad for everything.”

  “I mean, all time,” I said. “Like the first cavemen—and the pterodactyl who now inhabits the crossword puzzles. And the sixteenth century when nobody bathed hardly.”

  “And the Renaissance,” Jewel grinned. “I’m crazy about the Renaissance.”

  “Then we’ve got to do something about this.”

  “About what?”

  “Every suicide is a mass murderer. He kills everybody!”

  “Really, Wolf?” Her white face gazed up at me.

  “I just saw it clear as water.”

  “What?”

  “Everyone who dies takes centuries with him to the grave.” I felt the shiver that ran across her slight frame.

  “Don’t say that word—please.” Ah, success?

  “What word?” I said, pseudo-innocent.

  “Centuries. It’s such a long time. It depresses me.” Even her evasive sadness was enticing to me.

  “But can’t you see it?” I said. “Every inch of flesh on that lovely body of yours carries all the time, all the civilizations that led to you.”

  “What a waste.”

  “That’s why you mustn’t go down without at least a small salute to the past.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now—I’ll be Queen Isabella and you’re Columbus. Never mind about the sexes. Uh—how may I be of service to you, Señor Columbus?”

  “Jewels,” Jewel said. “Isn’t it something about jewels, a pawnshop and three ships?”

  “Darling, you’re impossible,” I said.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “I’ll do one. I’m the Pope and you’re Michelangelo.” She tried, unsuccessfully, to deepen her voice. “Michelangelo …”

  I knelt on the ice, skates and all. “Yes, your Holiness …”

  “I want you to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.”

  “Sure, boss,” I said. “What color you like?” And collapsed in despairing laughter on the ice. “I give up,” I said, and clambered to my feet.

  “No—there isn’t enough time to do it right.”

  “There was never enough time to do it right,” I said.

  “Then how will we spend the rest of the time?” A hint of heaviness in her voice. It was a delicate balance that had to be struck. Too much of that and you lost all you’d gain with just enough heaviness in the spirit, just enough rekindled concern.

  “There won’t be that much time left,” I said quietly.

  “At least I’ll know,” she said savagely.

  “Know what?”

  “Everything! All doubts settled.”

  “No,” I said. “Nothing settled.”

  “The hell it won’t be.”

  “Why should it? No matter what it turns out to be, why shouldn’t there be doubts connected with it?”

  “Because—” she faltered for a second, then continued, “because when you’re face-to-face, somehow, you know.”

  “We’re face-to-face. What do we know?”

  “We know … the things that we know.”

  “Let’s test it. What do I know about you since you left my bed and board? That you’re living with a man who’s unfaithful to you.”

  “Not really,” she said. “In the easy, silly ways, maybe. It’s like a tic.”

  “That you’re involved with an underground life you don’t really believe in.”

  “It’s given me more of myself than I ever had before.”

  “That Max was once dead—long enough for him to develop his theory of the equivalence of all things.”

  “You live with a man—not his theories. And I don’t believe he was ever dead.”

  “And yet—we’re face-to-face. Don’t have any hopes that it will settle anything. Feet getting tired? Do you want to rest?” I asked.

  Her manner told me before her reply: she was fresh as spring water. The wind had stopped whipping our cheeks; there was a stillness. The sun and moon still kept their double watch over us in their private quarters of the sky. The guests and some of the staff were resting. The time was ripe to pursue my plan to create Jewel at last, and to circumvent her suicide. I would operate, skillfully using memory, the arsenal of emotions, untapped hopes, buried hatreds masquerading in other guises, misplaced loves: the scalpels and sutures of my particular practice. My guide would be the Academy curriculum which I knew entirely by memory, of course. Thus, I chose my first course from the catalogue: Mystery 108.

  FAMILY AS MYSTERY

  Life as learning is connected to the question of time as subtraction … teaching as a defense … the mystery of learning what is already known …

  The seventeen-year-old Jewel, virginal, her mind filled day and night with thoughts of passion and parts, vague and empty child of late divorce, obsessed with finding her center of balance all through the long California beach summers. It was 1960. In Sweden three women were admitted to the pastorate of the Lutheran Church. And in London J. C. Kendrew elucidated the three-dimensional structure of the protein myoglobin.

  TIME AS STYLE OF EDUCATION

  Youth as substitute for growth … Her teacher, Miss Greenthal, was a great consolation. When she was with Miss Greenthal she felt a center in her being. She didn’t quite know where it was located, but she knew it was there.

  “I’ll teach you to dance,” Miss Greenthal said. “That’s one good way to find your center. Where you balance—that’s where your center is.”

  “Teachers are so literal,” Jewel sighed.

  “Just because you’re beautiful and I’m plain, don’t take advantage of my good nature,” Miss Greenthal said.

  “Am I beautiful?” Jewel said. But she would not let the plain teacher teach her how to dance. Perhaps it
was because she was so fond of her and had read The Well of Loneliness, even though Miss Greenthal had been married twice before she was twenty-five and had a little boy of four. (O the passionate androgyny of adolescence!) Finally, she asked Miss Greenthal to teach her how to dance. It seemed to her a miracle—to teach someone how to dance. Perhaps someday she would be a teacher.

  EXPERIENCE AS METAPHOR

  The mystery of similarity tends to equal the mystery of difference …

  Moving from this by alchemy of semblances, as expressed in metaphor, to my own seashore dance of youth: for “no center of balance” read “the child as observer.” This leads, of course, to “the adult as middle-man,” the “wanderer in the middle mist” (or read “the Jew in America”). No—the treatment is not getting out of control. The curriculum demands counter-involvement. Education for choice is a two-way process.

  It was my fourteenth summer, the summer of peculiar pulses, of random erections, of intellectual passions. I was a tanned vagrant of an adolescent that summer, the plaything of palm trees and dry winds. I would call down upon my head the reproaches of the Elders seated along the windows of the Study House busy at their task of study that seemed to me to resemble prayer, so intent and musical was the rhythm of their murmuring voices and the silent dithyrambs of their eyes … and all because of my habit of whistling.

  I whistled everything—the simplest of improvised melodies and the most complicated of Beethoven Quartets. I was a virtuoso of the pursed lips. But it was not light-heartedness that lay behind my lips. It was an inarticulate attempt to let out some of the confusions that could find no other style of expression. I knew, for example, that the “Rabbis” of the Fellowship did not study the Talmud in the traditional manner. Confusion: One of the most popular sayings among us was, the intelligent man studies what appears to him to be The Law. The wise man simply studies. Some studied old parables and sayings of the Fellowship, which were said to have derived from sources as varied as the Old Testament, the tales of the Chasidic Rabbis or the sociology of Max Weber. Others studied only commentary on heretical histories, such as those of Sabbatai Zevi or Jesus. But without any guide lines against which to measure, how can you call a thought a heresy?