by Paul Sussman
It didn’t work. The Pill didn’t work. I popped it, I swallowed it, I sat back – and lived. That was over seven hours ago, and I still haven’t come to terms with the whole thing. I doubt I ever will come to terms with the whole thing. The Pill didn’t work. It didn’t work. It didn’t fucking work. Bollocks.
I don’t know what to say. Words are wholly inadequate to describe just how betrayed I feel. Ninety fucking years I’ve carried that Pill around with me; pampering it, caring for it, protecting it, loving it; and the one time I really need the damn thing, it sodding well lets me down. So much for friendship.
And it was all going so perfectly too. I’d finished the note precisely where I’d wanted to finish it, and in precisely the right colour. I’d opened and tasted my bottle of Domaine de Chevalier 1982 and found it to be absolutely delicious (yes, yes, I know, I should have let it breathe, but time was pressing). I’d watched the most glorious firework display down below in the village, the millennial sky graffitied with spatters of red and white and green and blue. Even the knocking on the front door had suddenly ceased, and with it the thudding in my back. Everything seemed so right. So ready. So focused.
‘This is it,’ I said to myself. ‘This is the moment to die. This is the time.’
And so, with the fireworks still popping down below, I crossed to the dome and winched it right the way open so I could see the stars overhead, and sat myself down inside, and smoked a last cigarette, and propped The Photo on my knee. And then I poured myself a glass of claret and, at about half-past midnight, to the sound of an immense bang from the last firework of the night, and without further ado, I placed The Pill on my outstretched tongue and washed it down with a long gulp of wine, settling back in my red wickerwork chair and waiting for the poisons – the strychnine and the arsenic and the salt of hydrocyanic acid – to take effect. I felt neither happy nor sad, nor anything very much at all, except empty. Very, very empty.
But of course they didn’t take effect, the strychnine and the arsenic and the salt of sodding hydrocyanic acid. Five seconds passed, then another five, then ten, and before long it was a whole minute since I’d taken The Pill and still nothing had happened.
‘Perhaps it has a delayed reaction,’ I thought to myself. ‘Perhaps it’ll hit me any moment.’
The minutes slipped by, however, and any moment never came.
Around the ten-minute mark the thought suddenly struck me that perhaps I had died and simply pitched up in an afterlife that was similar in all respects to the one I’d just left. For a moment I felt a surge of relief, but it soon wore off, and by the time 15 minutes had elapsed, at which point I was feeling as fit and healthy as I’d ever felt in my life, I was left with no option but to face up to the truth. The Pill had failed me. I was alive. My suicide was a non-event.
‘It didn’t work,’ I mumbled over and over. ‘It didn’t fucking work.’
I remained sitting thus, numb, shell-shocked, dazed, right the way through the night, perched on the ruins of my expectations as though on the rubble of a bombed-out city. I didn’t move when the great racks of cloud came rolling westwards across the sky like curtains. And I didn’t move when the first faint froth of snow began to fall, nor when the fall became heavier and the flakes started to settle on my head and legs and feet, and all around me, colonizing the world with glistening multitudes of whiteness. My wine glass filled with snow, tinged pink by the dregs of my suicidal claret, and snow piled up on top of my head like a hat, and on my hands, and the tip of my nose, and The Photo disappeared beneath a shroud of snow.
‘It didn’t work,’ I mumbled over and over. ‘It didn’t fucking work.’
And still it snowed and snowed and snowed, so that everything started merging into everything else, and it all became a huge blank.
Only when the clouds eventually began to break like ice-floes, fragmenting and drifting off towards the west, and a thin white streak of dawn began to show over the sea, and the last snow flurries ceased, and the world was wholly silent, did I at last heave myself to my icy feet and slope dejectedly back to my bedroom, the bedroom I thought I’d never see again. Since both my purple felt-tips were empty, I had to use one of those disgusting shit-brown ones; and since there was no space left on the wall before the roof stairs, I was left with no choice but to start again on the other side, to the right of the doorway. Not only, therefore, has my suicide gone for a ball of shit, but my note too. After ending so perfectly, and with such precision, it’s now dribbling on like a splatter of watery diarrhoea. The knocking’s started again downstairs, and my wings are raging.
I can provide no satisfactory explanation as to why The Pill didn’t work. It may be that it had simply faded with age – humans do, after all, so why not pharmaceuticals? – or been affected by the cold weather of the last few days. Possibly the five years it spent Sellotaped beneath my armpit damaged it, or the 24 years in the tight, clammy pocket of my butler’s livery, or the five years in the cold, damp atmosphere of Offlag 18B. Maybe Mr Emilie got the formula wrong. Maybe he just made the whole thing up for a bit of fun. Maybe I possess some freak genetic immunity to that particular combination of poisons. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. There are so many possibilities.
The one idea that I can’t seem get out of my head, however – and feel free to laugh if you want to – is that The Pill was somehow dependent upon Emily. That her power was its power, and that when she faded, so too, in a sense, did it. I can’t really explain what I mean here, because I don’t really understand what I mean myself. It’s more of a feeling than a theory. No doubt it’s complete rubbish, and the real culprit is, after all, age, or the weather, or some inherent flaw in The Pill’s constitution. Deep down, however, something within me insists that Emily was responsible. She gave me The Pill. And in the end she took it away too. Her departure has thus ruined the death I was about to embrace for no other reason than her departure. What a complete and utter fucking mess.
Anyway, there’s no point going on about it. The Pill is gone. Emily is gone. The night is gone. And, in a moment, I will be too. Oh yes, I’m not finished yet. Not by a long shot. I’ve no intention whatsoever of not dying. Quite the contrary. The failure of my suicide has rendered me more determinedly suicidal than ever, and I fully intend to try again. The Pill, after all, wasn’t the only means available to me. Don’t forget that I live perched on a cliff, 300 feet above jagged incisors of razor-toothed rock. What pharmacology can’t achieve, gravity certainly will. It’s now a matter of principle. I’m going up and over, and that’ll be the end of it. I refuse to give in and live.
It’s almost eight o’clock on the first morning of the third millennium, and the light of dawn is spreading in the eastern sky. The attack on my castle appears to have reached its climax. Downstairs I can hear windows breaking and a splintering of wood as the front door finally succumbs to the fury of the knocking upon it. My sanctuary has been breached and it’s time to evacuate. My back, too, feels as though it’s about to split open. No more. I must go and kill myself a second time. I urgently need to die.
MORE AFTERWARDS
JESUS CHRIST, I’M flying! Flying through the air like a bird! Whoosh! Swoop! Weeeeeeee! Ha-ha! I’m going up and up and up, and now dowwwwwwwn! Weh-heh! Tra-la-la! This is fantastic. I feel so happy! I feel so free!
You’ve got to hear what’s happened. It’s incredible! (Watch this, I’m going to do a loop-the-loop – Wo-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh!)
I went up to the roof to jump off the battlements, just as I said I would. And behind me, in the depths of the castle, I could hear the smashing of wood as the front door was broken down, and the shattering of windows, and the crash and roar of collapsing masonry. But I ignored it all and rushed across the roof, damn nearly breaking my neck when I slipped over on the snow, and got to the battlements, and clambered up, and shouted: ‘Fuck the world!’ at the top of my voice and then without a backward look threw myself headlong into the void. Geronimo!
Well, I fell and fell and
fell. And the cliff was rushing by on my right-hand side, and the sky on my left, and everything was very blurred, and the wind was screaming in my ears, and my back was going boom, boom, boom, harder than it had ever done before. And there was this loud splitting sound that I couldn’t account for.
Anyway, I fell and fell and fell. And fell and fell and fell. And fell and fell and fell. And fell and fell and fell and fell and fell. And then, after a while, I thought, ‘This is strange, I should have hit the rocks by now. The castle’s not that high up.’ So I had a look around, and what do you know but I’m not falling at all. I’m just sort of bobbing gently up and down.
‘Very damned strange,’ I thought. ‘Either I’ve died, or got caught in a freak thermal, or else—’
And I craned my neck around, and there they were! Right behind me. Wings! Huge, white, flapping, feathery wings, with bloodstains on them, presumably where they’d burst out of my back. (That explains the ripping sound.)
Well, to start with, I wasn’t at all happy.
‘You bastards!’ I screamed. ‘You total tossers! You’ve had all these fucking years to come out, and you have to do it now, just when I want to die. Leave me alone! Stop flapping. I want to die, I say. I have to die!’
The wings didn’t do anything, however, just continued to beat, slowly, rhythmically, calmly, as though they weren’t a part of me at all, keeping me exactly where I was in the middle of the sky. I reached my hands round and tried to grab them, but, as anyone who’s got wings will know, that’s not very easy, and apart from pulling out a couple of feathers – very damned painful – I didn’t have much success.
So I shouted and screamed for a bit, and kicked my feet, and said all sorts of rude and unmentionable things. And the wings just flapped and flapped, ever so gently, keeping me right where I was, suspended in mid-air.
And after a while I had to admit, despite myself, that it felt rather good to be floating thus. Very good, in fact. One of the best thing I’d ever felt in my life.
So, anyway, I was still pissed off, but I thought, ‘Well, now I’m here I might as well have a go,’ so I sort of clenched my buttocks, and moved my shoulders around, and arched my back, and basically tried to control the flapping. And, much to my surprise, it worked! I could use my wings! It wasn’t easy, rather like someone who’s been limbless from birth suddenly sprouting a pair of new legs, but after a bit of practice I gradually got the hang of it, and before long I was going up and down and round and round as though I’d been doing it for the whole of my life. It was much less tiring than walking. And much more invigorating. The only thing I had some problems with was gliding. Very difficult, gliding. Takes a lot of skill. And confidence too.
So, anyway, I flew around for a while, acclimatizing to my new situation, and then I suddenly remembered the castle, and the note, and I looked down and what do you think I saw? Rubble. A vast mound of smouldering rubble, with here and there amongst the chaos a fragment of white wall with indecipherable words upon it. I swooped a little lower – swooping really is an orgasmic sensation – and there on the western edge of the rubble, tiny against the mound of ruins in front of them, hand in hand in the snow, stood two children, a boy and a girl, both with beautiful blond hair, both laughing.
‘So you’re the ones who’ve been hammering on my door, are you?’ I thought to myself. ‘You’re the tormentors!’
I was having such a good time in the air, however, and feeling so light-hearted, that I just couldn’t feel angry at them for knocking my castle down, and so instead swooped a little lower and shouted to them, and when they looked up – the boy with glittering blue eyes, the girl burning green – I waved at them, and they waved back at me, and then we played for a while, me dive-bombing from above, they rushing to and fro through the snowy bracken, screaming in delight. And then I left them and flew out to sea a way, looping and rolling in the icy dawn air.
I think I shall stay alive for a little longer. I don’t know how much longer, but the way I’m feeling at the moment, it could be centuries.
I’m also thinking that perhaps I could rewrite my note. I’m sad that it’s all crumbled to ruins after so much hard work, but not overly so. It will be fun to do it again. To recreate myself once more. Obviously, I can’t do it in the castle, but there are plenty of other places. The snow-covered hills, I can’t help noticing, look like a large, undulating sheet of paper.
I do feel bad about cancelling my suicide, but what can I do? I took The Pill and it didn’t work. I jumped off a cliff and I grew wings. It obviously wasn’t meant to happen. Not yet, at least. Maybe at a later date. I should still like to top myself, if only to prove that it can be done. For the moment, however, I think I shall err on the side of life.
It is the most glorious morning, a truly fitting start to the new millennium. The clouds have now all disappeared westwards, and on the other side of the sky dawn is blooming in pinks and greens and swirling trumpets of delicate blue. The air is cool and fresh, the sea as calm and still as a millpond. In a moment I think I might come down for a quick snooze, although how on earth I’m supposed to land is anybody’s guess. First, however, I want to fly out and have a look at those islands. One of the more noticeable by-products of not killing yourself is a quite extraordinary surfeit of energy. Not to put too fine a point on it, I feel absolutely fucking fantastic.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
When Paul wrote the acknowledgements for his books he always took great care to thank everybody who had played a part in bringing them to fruition. As I was not involved in the editorial of this book until recently, it’s impossible to know exactly whom to thank for what.
I do believe, however, that Paul has left some clues. In all of his books he would name characters and places after people that he knew. This was his way of acknowledging many of his friends and influences, and this first novel is no exception. I hope that those who have been acknowledged in this way will take pleasure in finding themselves in these pages.
For my part, I would like to thank Paul’s agent, Laura Susijn, who first suggested the possibility of publishing this book, and his editor, Simon Taylor, for his advice, encouragement and insightful editorial notes. I am hugely grateful to have been able to edit the book with the help of those who knew and loved Paul and who shared the same determination to stay true to his unique spirit.
I’d also like to thank Paul’s parents, Stanley and Sue, for their support and love.
About the Author
Paul Sussman read history at Cambridge, where he won a Joseph Larmor Award and was a Boxing Blue. A founding journalist with the Big Issue, he also wrote for the Independent, Guardian, Evening Standard and for CNN.com.
His novels – The Lost Army of Cambyses, The Last Secret of the Temple, The Hidden Oasis and The Labyrinth of Osiris – are crime thrillers set in contemporary Egypt and Israel with archaeological mysteries at their heart. They have been translated into over 30 languages and sold over three million copies.
Paul died suddenly in May 2012. He was just forty-five. He is survived by his wife, Alicky – a television producer – and their two sons. The Final Testimony of Raphael Ignatious Phoenix is both Paul’s first, and his last novel. Written early in his career, it was a script that he had set aside to concentrate on his thrillers. It was rediscovered after his death and its publication posthumously fulfils a long-held wish.
Also by Paul Sussman
The Labyrinth of Osiris
The Hidden Oasis
The Last Secret of the Temple
The Lost Army of Cambyses
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First published in Great Britain
in 2014 by Doubleday
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © The Estate of Paul Sussman 2014
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This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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