Suicide Academy

by Daniel Braun Stern

  Still others merely exercised an extreme form of concentration, with or without any matter to focus on. This was considered to be something between study and prayer.

  I had studied European history with my father—from the special angle of the Fellowship, naturally. I was a smart boy. I knew that the Fellowship was a pastiche of the shtetls. And I could tell that the Study House was not a true study house but rather a confused, poetic imitation of one. I sensed, without formulating it, that the Fellowship was a passionate attempt at re-imagining what it is to be a Jew, almost from scratch—not discarding five thousand years of lore and tradition, but transforming it so completely by making it an almost pure and abstract act of will, that it could either be a fresh beginning or a stale dead end.

  O, the murmurous pseudo-study houses of my youth against which I whistled my confusion and rebellion.

  “Shut up the hoodlum.”

  “Doesn’t he know whistling disturbs the dead?”

  It was the summer of invention as well. My vacation assignment from the Fellowship study group was to invent a new language. In the world of the Fellowship this was a perfectly reasonable request. The word was the world, and what should one create if not worlds? The imitation of God was not considered overly ambitious. It was simply common sense. Whom else should one imitate: the Devil?

  I had made my start by deciding to create a language that would exalt the verb. I walked around the sublimely sunny streets, my head ringing with phrases for my new language. Streeting is the most magnificent characteristic of cities. Godding is what separates man from the beasts.

  I even tried it in Hebrew style (though this required writing it down in the notebook I always carried). Beasts from men separates what is Godding. Of course I was only arranging the words backward. I could see why Leonardo needed the impossible mirror writing for his notebooks.

  More ambitiously. Instead of there were automobiles in the street, read, the street automobiled.

  Define laughter. Laugh is laughing movements of laughing apparatus (face) in rhythmic rictus.

  (How to use this laughing but serious interlude of my childhood against Jewel’s death? Relate to us—marriage—sexuality. Wait—the link is there.)

  The strangest part of that summer was not about language and learning. It was about my penis. My father had somehow gotten the notion that it was unhealthily small, underdeveloped. He was worried.

  O, Solomon, you never saw the midnight erections whose length equaled the enormity of my fourteen-year-old desire.

  But Solomon’s worry drove us both to the Doctor, where, unashamed in my presence, my father stated his fears. I knew, as soon as the words were out, that there was nothing to fear. Whenever anyone has described me to myself or to others I have always had the sense of falseness—no matter how accurate the facts might be. I’m sure you’ve had the same sense of distance between yourself and your “facts.”

  I saw, too, suddenly, that all was linked. Words were more real to me than things. (My beloved sky as a thing was the closest I’d come to an abstraction.) The word penis or its euphemisms—prick and cock—were more immediate than the dangling emblem under so much dispute. Thus, while I invented a new language, my father and the Doctor went about inventing a new organ for me. I awaited only the word that would tell me what it was: small, adequate, deformed, excellent.

  (Languages, organs—out there on the immemorial ice the situation began to splinter apart. I was not in control—or was I—had I ever been? Fragments of our marriage, of Jewel’s childhood and mine, sprang to life. Who was here to save whom? Was this the latest curriculum?)

  The ice-cooled wind brushed my face, intrusion of sense. I looked at Jewel’s face, a taste of bitterness. A few hours with her and already I was re-acquainted with tormented ambition, with the false assurances of love. The reverse of castration; she had stolen my indifference. A false penis of jealous and ambiguous desire swelled between us. We cannot help anyone so long as we want something from them. Least of all if we are not certain of what we desire. The danger then: we may want everything from them.

  “Here, young man, let’s have a look at this little bugger. Hah! There we are. Hummmm …”

  “Yes,” my father said, all anxiety.

  She was almost somnolent, if one can be somnolent in the path of an icy wind speckled with snowflakes. Her eyes were half-closed; she seemed to be surrendering herself to the curriculum. It was not a good sign. That kind of passivity could be stubborn, could outlast anything I might bring to bear. I’d seen it before. It was a sibling to death. A kind of acting-out of what it would be like afterward. As if it were going to be like anything! The self-help manuals she’d used to bring home after her mother died were right after all. Patient, heal thyself!

  Anger struck, wind-cold. Damn it, she hadn’t earned suicide. If this sweet, often empty waif whose life had yet to curve itself into even the slightest, most misleading of shapes, if even she could choose suicide, then the act itself was debased beyond redemption. As a craftsman of voluntary death I hated the idea. Suicides were the aristocrats of death—God’s graduate students, acting out their theses to prove how limited were the alternatives He had allowed Himself and His creatures. Their act was, at its best, superb literary criticism. At its worst—well, perhaps it was this blonde loveliness, not yet defined, and dying of its lack of definition. Giving away to dust the lovely outlines of those ever-so-slightly conical breasts, those long and tapering legs, that rounded cheek curving to indentation of shadowed eyes … all because of lack of shape. No! Suicide must be more than mere abortion. Part of my job had to be to save people for their proper deaths.

  In a perversity of joy and despair I hugged her to me. Perhaps a little harder than I had to. Could she be jostled awake? If necessary we could conduct a belated examination of penis and jostle her awake that way. Or was that what I’d had in mind all along? Strands of her hair blew into my mouth and I moved my head from left to right grazing her skin with my lips. A fourteen-year-old erection began to assert itself between my (her?) legs.

  Magnificent, Wolf Walker, I thought, truly magnificent. Translate your concern, your panic over your Jewel into a sublime quest for the value of your work! Save her with a lie and it will be worse than losing her.

  But I didn’t believe that for a minute. The trick was, don’t stop with the lie. Track it down further—to the end, if possible. Use the curriculum. (Her long legs were moving against mine. Passion of adumbrated death throes?) Nonsense! Cancel such romanticism. This was Ravel, not Mahler. French cool, not German artificial heat. Monophonic, not the endless proliferation of contrapuntal voices until the illusion of time is made concrete, thick with obstacles. Which was the way back to my most excellent loneliness? If Jewel crumbled under my fingers she could poison the air of the Academy for me, forever.

  “Wolf,” she murmured. “It done have shouldn’t I.” Ah! Participation in the dual past. Possibility becomes possible. My erection becomes medicinal. Self-deception is essential for the cure.

  “Shouldn’t have done what, Jewel?”

  “I got pregnant in July, or so the Doctor figured out later. They don’t ever know exactly. Max was angry and I was frightened. I was in the middle of teaching a class in modern dance and Max was filming it. The first thing he did was to go off somewhere and go back on hard stuff. But he came off it after a couple of weeks. (He comes off amazingly fast. He says it’s because he was dead once.) After that came a bunch of endless talks—we used to have what we called LTs and BTs. Little talks for little problems and big talks for big ones. Well, these were big BTs. About how the baby was going to cramp our style—we’d been scheduled to go to the Secret Film Festival in New Mexico in August, the month the baby was due—but neither of us would use the word abortion before the other one did. So it was never spoken.

  “I don’t know when my insane idea started. Pretty late in the game, I think. The eighth month. I remember it was so hot I found it difficult to breathe; I thou
ght my old asthma from when I was a kid was coming back. Then, lying in bed one night trying to catch my breath in the heavy heat, I had a comical thought. I didn’t want to have this baby. There I was making an enormous tent under the bedclothes—Max was off somewhere as usual—and I did not want to continue this whole business to its logical conclusion. I’m sure most women have this feeling. But they let it go at that. For some reason on that asthmatic night I didn’t let it go. In fact I found myself breathing harder from excitement. I was going to do it! Or rather I was not going to do it! I didn’t quite understand the how of it, but I was determined.

  “For the past months I had been slowly letting the growing object inside of me knit me together. All the loose and vagrant wishes and tag ends of sensibility that prevented me from being any of the things I wanted to be—or often from realizing what they were—had been gathering in my gut. I was losing so much that I’d always cared about—my looks, for example. The skin tone was bad, flabby around the neck and the mouth. My hair had no shine. The particular luster I knew my eyes had—no, I’m not ashamed to admit that I knew it—was not there any more. There was a dull glaze instead. My whole style—the nervousness, the feverish manner that attracted certain kinds of men to me—certainly Max, perhaps even you—all that had changed. I had, at last, a center of being. My mother would have laughed: after those adolescent years of questioning, of feeling like a cripple because everyone else seemed to have a center of being and I couldn’t find one in me no matter how hard or how deeply I searched. At last I was deliciously rooted to the ground. The baby as a substance in me and nothing else. It was a present addition. Not a future subtraction. So, when I conceived my marvelously ambitious plan, it had nothing to do with operations, falling down stairs—none of that theatrical stuff. I just wanted to continue the process past the appointed end.

  “The Doctor was the first to smell something going on. Old Pointy White Mustache.

  “‘I guess my calculations were a little off,’ he said.

  “‘I guess so,’ I said. I was delighted.

  “The Mustache expressed concern, then reassurance. Another few weeks would tell the tale. But the tale remained untold four weeks later. Then five and six. The Mustache’s examinations became more detailed. He could not explain it. So he waited a little longer.

  “It was then that I began my new life. I packed sandwich lunches and strolled through the Village looking in the windows of galleries and bookstores, my magnificent stomach preceding me by several glorious inches. I sat on the bench next to an old couple and spoke to them. I did their horoscopes, and they were grateful and told me about their ungrateful children and about their travel plans and asked when the baby was due; and all the while I sat there, not telling them that I was changing everything by the act of will centered in my stomach. Sitting in that spring sunshine like a bloated Goddess, I knew how Mary must have felt, only I knew more than she had known. Because I knew that to refuse to bear the Messiah and somehow bring it off was to shake up the whole system of the world—and to challenge the whole idea of life’s having beginnings, middles and ends. Why” not just beginnings, for example? And what would that nice old couple have said if I’d casually mentioned that I was ten months pregnant? Almost eleven.

  “In Washington Square Park I sat on the rim of the fountain and munched my cheese sandwiches. Inside of me I charted ebbs and flows that no woman has ever experienced before. Strange sea-changes were happening in my womb. Cervical life-changes; my experiment was not involved with death. It was simply a question of prolonging something until it turned into something else.

  “Old Pointy White Mustache told Max that I had to be operated on right away—a Caesarian. I refused. At first Max flipped out. Then he was sullen. You know—it’s your life kind of thing. But Max always read me pretty well. And he could see something happening in my eyes—could feel the gathering together rather than the splintering apart that was taking place in me—and he cooled off a bit. (By this time it was eleven months and more.)”

  CONTINUITY AS DEATH

  Stasis seen as answer to series theory … challenge to cause and effect as liberation for all …

  “I had always thrived on conflict—you remember, Wolf. I was the mistress of scenes. Confidence and resolutions whispered and shouted in the middle of the night. If life was dramatic then I could be sure I was alive. That was why I kept waiting for you to make me free of all that. To make me…. And when you didn’t, then maybe Max, I thought. But finally it was not necessary. I had passed the year-end mark and I was still pregnant. I gave up going to see old Pointy White Mustache. This was too big for him. Having left drama behind I had the calmness of my convictions.

  “Think of it, Wolf. I could go through my entire life weighted down with the actual presence of this baby. (I shouldn’t write old Pointy White Mustache off so fast. He was of some help. Up until the middle of the twelfth month he kept taking tests and assuring me that the baby was still alive. I could tell anyway, feeling life frequently. But it was good to have scientific confirmation.)

  “Which means, of course, that some new kind of being was brewing inside there. And old fearful me—I had no fears that it would be some kind of monster. I knew that the result of an act like this could only be good. But imagine how I felt. Since I was a kid I’d always felt singled out for some special destiny. Then when it didn’t show up I became what passed for me. But I knew it wasn’t, really. This—now this—was me! And what new richness would a child have that was baked slowly and carefully in my oven for years instead of months?

  “My new gravity was too great for air. I walked on the bottom of the sea while people swam past me, and stores and children and cars all swayed in the sea-green atmosphere. By the time I reached the fourteenth month there was no such thing as time.”

  Quickened breathing and pulse rate. Good sign? But there was such a thing as time, and there wasn’t much left; the stolen rest hour was almost up. I took another deep pull on Max’s flask.

  “Oh, Wolf, you would have been proud of me.” She turned away then whirled on me. “You never thought I’d be so much, did you, Wolf? Did you? Little Jewel—all doubts and blonde vagueness—coming to such a thing. To change everything. You see, that’s what I began to realize was up. Nothing less than a complete change of the way everybody lives. Why, my God, if you could shatter a simple rule like nine months for the birth of a child—why, nothing would ever be the same again. Oh, if only I could have known when I was a little girl, lost on the edge of Malibu Beach, good for nothing but putting on the school play once a year, I could have told my poor mother who never understood that someday I would break the whole miserable chain. By an act of will—or body—or both—I would make it different for whatever son or daughter finally came out of me. An end to repeated memories, lies, possibilities that only seemed like possibilities—until finally, one day, you’re a little older and you’re doing the same things your mother and father did before you: slicing bread the same way, or marrying the same kind of man. I swear I stopped in front of a mirror as I was brushing my hair away from my face, remembering an evening when my mother was bemoaning being left alone and widowed by my father—and I realized that there I was with Max always away, that I was alone and widowed. The only difference was I was with a man who claimed to have died a little and come back. But now I was going to break all that endless circle of repetition. Of course, some days I just got depressed at the idea of the new kind of human child I was inventing. And I’d go back to the idea that I could go on like this for good. It wasn’t growing in size any more. It would simply be me, Jewel—a heavier Jewel with occasional veins giving under the strain. What are a few purple splotches on your legs (though I do love my legs)? But wouldn’t it be worth it to show everyone—to show you, Wolf, because I did love you and maybe should have stayed with you—how everybody can be free. How you don’t have to finish. Finishing, completing, that’s slavery. But starting—that’s being free.”

  He
r tempo had picked up, like her pulse and her breath. She smiled at me, a lewd smile. “It didn’t even hurt the love-making. We just got very inventive after a while. And very delicate. It brought out a side of Max I never knew.”

  I didn’t want to hear this part. But I had no choice. The question that was buried at the back of my morning mind—the Max-question—seemed to have relevance now to three other people entirely. Yet it burned painfully. If Gilliatt was in any way party to this part of the curriculum he must have been having a delicious time. “Jealousy does not become Milord the Jew. The Jew of Venice was named Shylock—not, if you recall, Othello.”

  Now she swung away from me, alone in her own little quadrant of solitary ice. Either she was swaying slightly from side to side, or the tippling at Max’s flask was finally announcing its sovereignty over my bloodstream—or both.

  “Oh, part of me knew it was a sickness. But a benign one. Wolf, it was magnificent! I would walk the streets, Mother to all the Earth. They were all my children—the snot-nosed kid in the playground I passed, the bored housewife swapping lies with her neighbor, even the businessman weighed down by his attaché case. I had come to free him too, to free all of them.”

  She was doing a wild interpretive dance of freedom on her skates. My God, I thought, had she caught this Messianic zeal from me? My mind was whirling with conflicting thoughts, feelings. She was infused with a new energy; that was good for the treatment. On the other hand she was quite possessed; that might not be so good. I was even, in that waning, winter light, ready to believe that she had brought off her marvelous act of will, had made the metaphor stand for reality. But how to bring her down, now, from the heights of remembered omnipotent joy, down to where I could handle her again?

  “I was a teacher, Wolf, at last. Like my darling Miss Greenthal who told me dancing would give me a center of balance. Nothing could keep me back.” Her yellow hair spun around and against her flushed cheeks. “I could love everybody at last; and they would all love me because I had made everything possible for them—and I was doing it inside my own body. They were all inside of me waiting to be born, all of them …”