Suicide Academy

by Daniel Braun Stern

  My bladder was bursting. I could think of nothing but the nauseating pressure, and alternately, the longing for Jewel that I had not left behind me on the ice. But Brand compelled my attention with his words.

  “So you realize that the tradition of impartiality is just that—a tradition, not a law. Nowhere is it written.”

  “Then what are you suggesting?” An unpleasant premonitory sensation was creeping over me.

  “Just that the time has come to take a stand. We should set a quota of positive decisions for each day—and do everything necessary to see that it’s filled.”

  I stood up as if the chair were going to crack under me. The pressure on my bladder was suddenly gone, replaced by a sensation of blood flushing my head that made my ears ring.

  “But that’s against everything—”

  “Come on, Walker. You must know about this issue. Rath doesn’t see it my way. But I’m making my presentation today to the Board. And I’m going to win.”

  A slow rise of disgust filled me. Back to the world of accidents, chances, choosing sides, winning and losing! All the floating garbage of Max’s world. My face must have shown my feelings.

  “Don’t take it so big.”

  “You’ll kill everything,” I said.

  “On the contrary.” Brand beamed at me, all threats dissolved in the benign sunshine of his confidence. “Don’t you understand—the way we’re going we’re not affecting the results either way. Statistically we might as well vanish. Don’t you think it’s important that we be of some use?”

  “We are,” I said passionately. “We exist. That’s our use. But to manufacture choices, even a choice for life—that’s an ugly goal. That’s a stinking monologue. All you’re proving is that there’s some mystery still. Well, that’s why we’re here. That’s why the research.”

  “Aren’t you talking out of both sides of your mouth, Wolf?”

  “How?” I was stalling stupidly. If Jewel was enrolled, if she was by now at the Beauty Parlor, for example, then the little desk-top computer could be telling Brand right now about my session on the ice.

  “Gilliatt seems to think you are.”

  “Gilliatt has his own axe to grind. On my Jewish skull.”

  “Of course, we know all about Gilliatt. Even his connection with the two spies who are making films on the grounds today.”

  Spies? Did every high office carry with it an automatic electric charge of paranoia? But who was mad? Brand or me? Here was this hulk happily proposing a stand on the side of saving lives, and it filled me with nothing but revulsion. True, I’d slipped because of Jewel. But I was damned if I’d fallen that far. My hands were still wrapped around the silent hills, the icy rocks, the gray sky from which snow spat, goaded by the aimless, ferocious wind; my feelings were still commanded by the search for the special few whose desperation could lead them over me, away from whatever role they were playing toward a destiny. Over me! Pontius Walker. (Pontius—from the Latin pons for bridge.) But I would not wash my hands of them. Surely for such love I could be forgiven the sin of nostalgia, the felony of memory.

  But if this afternoon’s program were the program forever—no! Saviours were criminals peddling hope in exchange for this or that choice. An abomination. My mind was running over a hundred remembered fragments of papers, books, treatises on the Academy’s goals. Brand could never make it stick. It was more than heresy. It was betrayal. I was dizzy. All I’d had for food was half the contents of Max’s flask. Right now what I wanted was more of the same. I regretted turning down Brand’s offer.

  “Don’t think,” Brand was saying, “that I’m recommending any shortcuts or vulgarizations of process. I have a sense of craft, too. I mean, look, I could produce a hell of a lot of positive decisions by cheap methods.” Chameleonlike, now he was Daddy Brand, full of good-will and common sense.

  “I’ve been working on a paper that suggests the possibility that all our exquisite care and planning here—and I know how much of it you’ve been responsible for (this last thick with unction)—we all know—may actually be increasing the daily quota of suicides. Why, I could turn the choice of any given day one hundred percent toward life. You know how? By turning this place into a kind of concentration camp. People could be seized on arrival. They couldn’t do anything about it; the whole thing is illegal anyway. Then, if the place were turned into a pigsty of chaos, filth, cruelty and hopelessness, they’d all choose to go back. You’ve read Gilliatt’s paper on the low rate of Negro suicides. The connection is clear. But hell, boy, that’s not the kind of thing I have in mind.” He did his sniffing act—a deep one, as if breathing were some kind of artificial technique, something you did with tools. One chance, I thought desperately. Appeal. My appointment with Rath. A higher authority. I looked at my watch for salvation. It was four thirty.

  “I have to go,” I said. “I understand Rath doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

  He waved me out. “Go on,” he said. “It was good talking to you.” His steps paced me to the door. “And listen. If you play ball with me you can forget about Gilliatt’s charges.”

  I said nothing. I said it so violently my head ached.

  At the door he put a great, enveloping arm around my shoulders. “I feel I’ve gotten through to you,” he said. “Maybe language isn’t finished after all.” His grin threatened to turn into a violent laugh. His white teeth overlapped each other, lopsided. I tensed myself for the explosion. Instead he softly said, “So long. Be good.” (From the Old English god, related to the Gothic term goths, meaning suitable or fitting according to your own lights.)

  7

  THE LIBRARY HERE IS enormous. I was in no mood to read, but slowly the catalogue hypnotized me by its scope. And this one was only for the ground floor.

  When the chimes rang for the rest period the guide led us out. On the inside of the front door hung a plaque on which was printed:

  LONG AFTER THE WORLD WILL HAVE CEASED TO BE, THE WORD “WORLD” WILL STILL EXIST. THAT IS THE MEANING OF HOPE.

  Ah, I thought, you hypocritical bastards. But then as the wind shook the open door I noticed that the plaque hung loosely and could be turned around. On the other side was printed:

  LONG AFTER MEN HAVE CEASED TO DESTROY THEMSELVES THE WORD “SUICIDE” WILL STILLEXIST. THAT IS THE MEANING OF FATE.

  Okay, I thought. At least that evens the score. Hell of a motto for a library, though.

  In the end was the word.

  8

  RATH WAS A MOUNTAIN. Fat squeezed his eyes into a perpetual, artificial squint of a smile. He was the only man one could imagine to be more of a mass than Brand. These elder statesmen of the Academy seemed to have been chosen for their presence. He wore eyeglasses with thick lenses and kept pressing them to his forehead with one finger, peering out at me as if I were miles away.

  He spoke in a kind of guttural English. “Your assistant has made some unpleasant charges.”

  “They weren’t true,” I said quickly.

  “Weren’t?”

  “Aren’t true.” I consoled my sense of truth with the thought that I had merely slipped on the ice.

  “Let’s have it out quickly,” he said. “I don’t really care if you have been biased on the side of returning people alive. What matters is what has to be done. Yes? No?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “There is probably much you don’t understand,” he said. “For one thing, do you understand that this is not a non-profit organization? I was called in because I had succeeded in making Europe’s Academies earn a profit. And this one was in trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?” I asked stupidly.

  “The usual: money. Losing money.” He was lying, of course. But I had to play it out to the end to find out why.

  “How are you solving that?”

  “Think a minute, Walker. What’s the single biggest source of income for us?”

  “Bequests?”

  “Precisely! And if we allow a kind of
inborn passion for life in general to affect the balance of input and outflow—”

  “That’s Gilliatt’s lousy propaganda.”

  “—and with fewer deaths there are fewer wills. With fewer wills there are fewer bequests, and so on down and down and down.”

  “But I’ve seen figures on gifts from grateful guests who returned.”

  “Don’t give me that Brand’s crap! Talk about propaganda. That’s his line—he’s trying to sell the Board and me on it. He thinks there’s money in life.”

  “Well—”

  “Naïve garbage. Look, Walker, believe me in this matter. Go along with me—and I’ll see to it that everything goes beautifully this afternoon. At the meeting.”

  “Go along with you on what?” I tried to put some ring of sincere ignorance into my voice, even though I had a slowly growing sense of another disgusting proposal about to be made.

  “It’s essential that we move to a position of—”

  “Don’t tell me,” I said drily. “I’ll guess. Of negative choices.”

  “But that’s just what’s wrong. Those words. We’re going to have to re-define them. No? Yes? I mean some deaths are positive and some lives are almost entirely negative.”

  Tricky, I thought. Watch him.

  It was impossible to do anything else but. He filled the eye with bulk. He was so much there that I was physically oppressed into a listening silence. He walked up and down before me, clumping over space as if he were claiming and reclaiming it. His face creased and uncreased in nuances of fat, a counterpoint to his words.

  “We’ve oversimplified for too long,” he said. “Do you know that the skies over the various Academies at which I’ve served, all over Europe, all of them had special configurations and—get this—resulted in different configurations of suicides, both in number and in style. I mention skies because I know you have a relationship to them. Yes? No? I’ve done my homework for our little meeting. Them I said, for the sky. The plural is correct in my experience. At the Academy in Florence, for example. Firenze, my beautiful Firenze. Wolf, you wouldn’t believe how I loved it there. Of course, the Germans and the English have been worshipping Italy for centuries. And if you think you have a tough job, try running a Suicide Academy in a Catholic country. I was a Director like you in those days. It was the most complex job in the world. The skies over Florence have a kind of clustered openness—especially in the spring—a sort of running commentary to what happened below. Clouds bunching up and blowing apart, sometimes regardless of whether there was any wind or not. On the days when the skies cleared, do you know the rate of final suicides went down. Oh, God, the skies of Europe. In Copenhagen it was quite the opposite. When those big, fluffy, blustery black and white bastards you get there in the winter gave way to a flurry of little white rounded ones with a spilling of bright blue between them—maybe only for a day at a time—well, the unexpected would happen. The finals would go up. Yes, it was in Copenhagen that I learned to love a certain kind of inevitable suicide—the kind that all their lives would not take yes for an answer—and were damned if they were going to do it now, bright blue skies or no. So, they were damned—in all their purity. Those were my beloved positive-negatives. I’m sure you’ve come across the phrase in Academy literature. Those skies and those p-n’s taught me that a new terminology is needed.”

  “But,” I wedged myself between his overpowering body-speech and myself, “isn’t the result the same? Either a dead body or a living human being?”

  He didn’t take a beat. “Superficially, yes. But in this profession you can never jump to the other side of the grave or you’re finished. Yes? No? You’re not convinced? Example! Whether it’s murder or suicide there’s no difference after the fact. But before the fact … I’m sure you’ll agree that while there’s some kinship there’s still a hell of a lot of difference. No? Yes! Example. My mother—dear Hilda Steinert Von Rath. She and Mister (Herr) Von Rath—as she called him until her dying day—were at each other’s throats for thirty years. She used to tell my brother Werner and I that when we grew up she would divorce my father. She took up bookkeeping at night so as to have a trade. Then when we grew up and it became clear that she did not have the strength to take such drastic action she would tell us that soon she would have her revenge: she would kill herself. She did, finally A most expensive way of divorce … to pay for it with the only life you have. Of course she’d been paying, like so many, on the installment plan, so that it must, at the end, have seemed like a bargain. Yet all those years, when my father would lose his temper completely and would scream at her that he would put an end to his misery by putting an end to her by, in short, murdering her, she used to laugh at him—while we children shuddered. Now, do you mean to tell me that it would have made no difference if he had taken her life rather than she, herself? Yes? No? I think you’ll agree it’s best to stay this side of the grave in our work. Let’s leave the other side to those who know even less about it than we do—the theologians.”

  It was “our work” and “we,” now. Rath my colleague, both of us in this problem together. Then, as suddenly, he turned on me. With that bulk hovering over me it was an awesome sight.

  “Ah,” he said, “you damned starry-eyed liberals make me sick! You take a simple thing and you make a big deal out of it. You’re the cruel ones. It’s so simple. Someone hurts. You let him have the anesthetic! Is that crueler than your mystical search for the real thing? Oh, I know there are exceptions. The temporary ones. There has to be an estimation of a certain amount of seriousness involved. I mean, you must realize this isn’t a country club. But if we can increase the daily quota of negative choices we’ll be truer to the spirit of our original charter.”

  I stood fast, staring him down. I could see him figuring: the tough guy approach didn’t work—now what? Behold Rath the scholar, erudition as vast as his girth.

  “All we really have to offer is a straight line. A way out of the circle. Shetzler, in his eight-volume work on the role of the circle in human affairs, speaks of the Academies as great circle-breakers—since all suicides are merely present points on their own circular orbits of self-destruction.

  “The first Academies were all laid out in straight lines, the buildings all in a row, the gardens landscaped straight as a plumb line. Then in 1900 Allen Rhoad pointed out in his essay on The Naturalization of Nature that a straight line is the one design element never found in nature. That was the beginning of the first Academy reform: and the end of the straight line imitation period. (Rhoad, by the way, claimed that he was misinterpreted: that just because the straight line is not found in nature, we should use it in architecture, and design …)

  “The circle, you see, is at the heart of all human anguish. The sundial and the clock prove that if there were no circles there would be no time. If there were no time there would be no death. Thus—no circles, no death. Use your own observation, Walker. Most of our guests come to us suffering from circle fatigue. Repetition, full revolution and more repetition. When the fool persists in his folly he does not become wise—only more skillful at fooling himself. Imagine the wheel of Karma: the misery of endlessly repeated painful lives. Then imagine the joy of the straight line: forward movement, change. Even if the straight line leads straight down into the earth. Think of it! An end to circles!”

  He was weaving before me; an hypnotic flesh-pile. He was hypnotized by his own rhetoric. But the sight of so much living flesh preaching erudite death was nauseating to me. He and Brand deserved each other. (And I had my suspicions about Gilliatt.) I wanted out. Theirs were two interpretations of the same bad dream. That distant early morning of this difficult post-New Year’s Day seemed years away, an innocent time when dreams sang “reviens” and return became suddenly possible.

  I stood up so abruptly that Rath backed off. One finger pressed his spectacles made of thick fun-house glass against the bridge of his nose. He gazed at me as if to guess my next move. Then, by some subtle sag in his deeply buried
bones, I knew he’d come to a decision.