Hostages to Fortune

by William Humphrey

  So it was with him now. Reaching out to touch, which was to say not to touch and thereby dispel, his phantom, he touched only air, yet there it was. He might feel his body, pinch it, look into reflecting surfaces, but what his eyes relayed to his mind his mind did not receive, just as that poor disturbed woman, all the while praying “Dear God, please, I beg you, let my teeth be white. I know they are. I know it. Everyone tells me so. Please, God, let them be white to me,” with fear and trembling had looked and, between herself and her a veil of illusion intervening, had instead of white teeth seen black ones grinning hideously, mockingly at her. Looking over his shoulder as he looked at himself was another, implacably hostile, second self. This the mirror could not see, but there it was.

  What he needed was a change of scene, some company; he needed to get out of here and be among people. But in his listlessness he made no move, and the thought of being among people, at first distasteful, grew more and more frightening. He feared seeing in their responses to him evidence that he had become peculiar, that he had lost his mind. He was unsure of even his most ordinary gesture now. Was it that of a sane man or was there something about it to which he himself was blind, and which betrayed a state of mental alienation?

  With the death of love the love of death begins.

  What would it be like not to be?

  One who could ask himself that question had arrived, by whatever route, at a point where there could be only one answer.

  That au fond reversal of natural order, of life’s values, when a man took his archenemy, death, for his best friend, upset everything. Stand on your head and all the world was turned topsy-turvy. But just as an artist could learn certain things about his composition in no other way than by placing his picture upside-down on his easel, this odd angle of view could be uniquely illuminating. Though to be sure, the places into which the light was shone were places better left dark.

  Thus was answered his old question about the suicide’s choice of method, why one person chose to do it one way and another a different way. One did not choose, one was chosen, predestined. For this person a gas oven waited, for that one a razor blade and a warm bath, and of those two each would have said of the other’s method “Oh, I would never do that!” Birds of a feather? No, birds of altogether different plumage. What did the means matter when a man might himself his quietus make with a bare bodkin? He might, but only if bodkins were his thing. One had a choice only when one had no choice, like the prisoner in his solitary cell with nothing but his bedsheet to make himself a hangman’s rope. Seneca homilizes, “Wherever you look there is an end of evils. You see that yawning precipice? It leads to liberty. You see that flood, that river, that well? Liberty houses within them. You see that stunted, parched, and sorry tree? From each branch liberty hangs. Your neck, your throat, your heart are all so many ways to escape from slavery.… Do you inquire the road to freedom? You shall find it in every vein of your body.” A fine flourish of Roman rhetoric! Vanity to think one was free to pick and choose. Considerations operative throughout the life about to be willfully ended dictate the mode of death. The lifelong hydrophobiac will not drown himself nor the hater of firearms blow out his brains. Of these enemies of theirs they, who are their own enemies, remain afraid to the end. The swimmer will do it, the hunter will. The woman praised for the beauty of her neckline will not disfigure it in death by hanging herself. Only in that last line of Seneca’s speaks the man who when his time came did not jump down a well or hang himself from the limb of a tree or even consider these alternatives but who used the dagger he had saved for the purpose. The means was provided before the intention was discovered, just as before the question “What have I got to live for?” was asked, the answer was ready and waiting. The answer had prompted the question. In his case he had been filling prescriptions for sleeping pills and hoarding them for weeks without questioning why, without letting himself observe what he was doing.

  One effect of this reversal of things was shortly to make you feel that you no longer belonged to the human race. Its interests were not your interests, and because they were not yours and because yours were so much more serious and otherworldly, theirs seemed to you mundane, petty, frivolous, and vain. Time came to a stop for all men; the man who had stopped his own clock could look down upon others in condescension and pity.

  He learned at least to doubt that suicide was ever truly impulsive, spontaneous, altogether rash. It gestated. In even the seemingly most impulsive cases the tendency toward it had been there, dormant, waiting for something to catalyze it, like that insidious killer, cancer, painless until past cure. Maybe not for long, maybe virulent and headlong almost from its inception, with the shortest of incubation periods, a galloping consumption of the soul, but there already, silently at work. He doubted that even the very young did it the first time they ever considered it.

  Suicide was an addiction. It resembled alcoholism. In a mood of desperation one turned to the bottle. The contemplation of a painful but speedy and certain way to put an end to one’s pain was like one’s first drink of raw whiskey: one shuddered, gagged on it, nearly threw it up, but choked it down and it brought relief, anesthesia. Next time two drinks were needed to produce the desired effect. The habit grew, fed upon itself. Soon one was drinking in secret and on the sly and at unapproved hours of the day for drinking. Then came the time when, suddenly, it was you who were doing this to yourself. Not “one”—you. And realizing that the cure was killing you, you swore off, and the mere thought of that was enough to send you to the bottle ravening for a drink—a last drink—the first of many last drinks. So with the contemplation of suicide: you ended by becoming dependent upon it as your only way of keeping alive. You hugged it to you, afraid that it might be taken away, as the drunkard hugged his bottle, fearful that someone concerned for his health might take it from him.

  Another thing he learned by standing on his head—learned it in advance of the lesson itself: the actual doing of the deed was made easier, was made possible by a reversal in which time was made to run backwards. The effects of things were their causes. He would have been dead for some time already when he got around to killing himself. That would be an anticlimax, almost incidental. To die then would be, if only for an instant, to live, to experience sensation after the long coma of emotional insentience.

  Concentrate exclusively upon any one thing and the light shed upon that thing cast everything outside its circle in shadow. Now in the courtroom of his mind the advocate for death held center stage. He became a monologuist, a filibusterer, refusing to yield the floor. The objections by the voices that might have spoken in defense of life were drowned out. Discouraged from trying, they gave up.

  The voice of reason and restraint is always muted and moderated, level. Should reason become passionate and loud in its defense it ceases to be reason. Yet of all things reason is the most impatient. It can tolerate no disagreement. It finds it opponent’s claims too absurd to argue with and quits the field in disgust. One quiet and soon discouraged voice beset by the raucous mob which populates the mind of man: no wonder it is not much to be depended upon in times of most need.

  One could generalize about suicide as one could about any human activity, so far and no further; each case was the work of an individual and thus unique; but now he was finding answers to at least some of the questions he had asked when he was trying to explain Anthony. (And many times he could see that death’s head, so close in favor to his own, nod approvingly as he gained some new insight, as much as to say “Now you know. It was the only way you would ever understand: by following the path I cleared for you. To learn more, carry on. To learn all, go the distance.”) He had supposed that at some point Anthony’s personality had split in two, like those unicellular organisms that multiply that way, and that the halves had then turned against each other in a fight to the death. Now he disbelieved that, for such was not the case with him. Instead of into two, he divided into at least three distinct parts: the two between who
m the deadly contest was waged and a third who was their audience, a fascinated, terrified, and helpless audience of one such as he had been when as a small child at the Saturday movie matinee he had cried out to the unsuspecting hero on the screen to beware of the villain’s designs upon him.

  For in his drift toward danger he had not lost his fear, his instinct for survival; on the contrary, it had never been sharper. One part of him lived in constant, unremitting fear. But it was as though the other part were hypnotized. He could not get through to himself, break the spell, any more than he had been able as a child to make the actor on the screen hear and heed his warnings.

  Also, he was drawn on partway out of curiosity. Personal and professional curiosity. He was beginning to gain some insight into a thing which had long intrigued him and which before he could only try to imagine: the workings of the criminal mind. It was disturbingly close to the workings of the fiction writer’s mind, the kind he had always had: the shedding of his own personality and the projection of himself into an imagined character, the excitement of doing vicariously things one would never have done oneself, and he wondered whether his métier had prepared him for, even predisposed him toward this—and whether he had unknowingly manipulated the child of his flesh as he had done those who were the children of his imagination.

  To another of his old questions the answer was yes, suicide gave depth to a person—or the illusion of depth. To split oneself into identical halves was to gain the third dimension of stereo. To say to an unsuspecting world, I have potentials in me that you people do not dream of. Would-be killer and victim in one, he was twice the intellect he had ever been before. His destination determined and his course fixed, he was free to observe and study himself. This he did with the fascination and surprised enlightenment with which he followed his fictional characters whenever—as always occurred with the successful, the convincing ones—they themselves took over their destinies from his direction and went their own self-willed ways. This was fiction brought to life, with himself as all the cast. He had lost interest in himself; now his interest was renewed. He had thought he knew himself; he was more complicated than he knew. His death gave him something to live for. He had never plotted a story as successfully as this one. Each day was a chapter. What would he do next? To be continued.

  For as long as it lasted, this self-sustaining illusion that he was directing it gave to it a sense of make-believe and thus the comforting sense that his fear was synthetic, self-induced. Up to the end he would never quite fully believe that he was really going all the way. The preparations, yes; urged on by his helpful houseguest, up to the uttermost one, but then … Then something would intervene. The telephone, so long silent, would ring, a salesman would knock or some self-appointed door-to-door peddler of salvation, and the illusion would be shattered. The urgings of some cultist to mind his eternal soul would teach him how final a fate he had been flirting with. An airliner would pass overhead and he would look up and wonder where it was bound and that would remind him of places he had been to and make him sense once again how wide the world was, then wonder at himself, how he could have fallen so deeply into this deadly charade. Then to return to life would have the tonic shock of coming out of a matinee into the light of a day still to be fulfilled.

  This lesson he would learn only after it was all over, but one self-protective mechanism was at work for him all the while—or was it not rather the most self-destructive, the most self-deceptive of all? In the case of suicide the consequence trammeled up the deed. Obscured, lost in the soft seductive promise of the end was the hard means required to attain that end. Never in all that semisomnambulant time did the unpleasant business toward which this was tending present itself to his mind’s eye in all its grimness. Not one shred of pity or even of fellow feeling was he moved to by his occasional glimpses of his victim, his dead body, destroyed by his own hand. It was all preparation, a chase without an end in view, only a view of the sweet oblivion the other side of the end. So carefully planned, so long expected, the end would come as a surprise, almost an impertinence. Some unpleasant duty awaits my doing and only I can do it, a nasty chore to be gotten through and out of the way: of this he felt a dull, insistent but distant sense; however, the details of it were kept always out of mind.

  Meanwhile the self-hatred required to do the deed was administered in small but ever-increasing doses like the homeopathic inoculations of the venom of some insect to which one was allergic in order to build up immunity. Death would be robbed of its sting. Now whenever his lifeless body did intrude upon his thoughts it inspired him with no feeling other than distaste. Its piteousness did not plead its cause but further condemned it. It could be thought of only as a thing. The owner of it himself had judged it worthless, a burden upon him and upon the world. Imperfect as the knowledge was, who better than the man himself knew a man’s worth? How could anyone else feel for that inert and already decaying object anything but contempt and revulsion? Sweep it out of sight, put it out of memory.

  But it would never come to that. And afterwards he would never speak of it to a soul. For it would have been all make-believe, playacting, bluff, of a certain immaturity, a childishness then if you will, of which, even at the time he was most deeply engrossed in it, he was perfectly well aware, and even acutely aware. And he was painfully embarrassed by it. To be quite truthful, in its antisociability, its secrecy and furtiveness, it had all the attributes of adolescent self-abuse. Blame it on bad company; he had been enticed into it by that uninvited lodger of his. Meanwhile, however, his very embarrassment was, perversely enough, an incitement to carrying on with it. It was mischievous, naughty, a prank played by two bad boys on the world. He was curious to see what came next. That was an encouraging sign, a healthy sign. As long as you were curious you were safe. It was when you stopped caring about what came next that you were in real danger.

  And he could not have kept from taking the next step, foolish though he knew it to be, if he had tried. For it was not he doing it. Or rather, it was he and it was not he. It was some two-dimensional character projected upon a screen. Gone now was the rich sense of roundedness he had felt for a time. Now he could only watch. So sometimes did a crowd of people surrounding him like an audience in a darkened movie theater, watching him do such things. Such things as? Such as sorting and labeling things in parcels as though—As though what? As though to be found afterwards. He would be anxious, desperate to disassociate himself from that unreal character, to convince the crowd that what they were watching was him playing a role he had been cast in. Once the show was over and the lights went up he would step down from the screen and join them for a drink, a swim—whatever everybody was doing. And yet a feeling of ethereality, of other-worldliness, as though he were nothing more substantial than transparent celluloid, told him that he had ceased somehow to be like other people.

  Meanwhile, knowing how the story came out did not lessen the suspense, the tension; still to be discovered was the timing. How would he know when his time had come? Anthony, availing himself of the temporary absence of his roommate Jeremy that his method required, had had it settled for him. How many times during those days had he rehearsed it: put the noose around his neck and tightened it and stood on his chair? The end of that absence nearing and Jeremy’s return imminent, a voice had said to him “Now!” and he had kicked the chair from under him.

  Perhaps his time would come when the playacting, the sham of it all, his shame for his procrastination, simply overwhelmed him with embarrassment and he would not be able to face another day of it. He would not need courage. The staginess of it all would sicken him and that would steel him to do the deed, and do it right.

  He was learning much. Was that a part of the fascination of it? Much that otherwise he would never have known, could have learned in no other way. Maybe such knowledge was granted only to those who were not to be allowed to take it back with them from beyond. Others must learn it for themselves, as he had. Forbidden knowledge, reve
aled only to the daring, the unconventional, the dauntless, the self-exploratory few. One lesson was this: when a man became his own sworn mortal enemy a kind of inverted narcissism set in. By the world’s standards worthless, untouchable, he became to himself a prize. When never before had he—that was to say, his continuation, his future—been of so little consequence to him, a matter of utter indifference, he found himself studying himself with as much respect as a pathologist nurturing in his laboratory a microbe he hopes to wipe out, as a hunter stalks his prey, a fisherman plots his strategy against a trophy fish. Priest and sacrificial victim in one, like those of the ancient Aztecs: the knife would be driven home and the throbbing heart cut out whole, but in the meantime the doomed one was the chosen one and was a living god.

  Not that it would ever come to that. Not that he was going through with it. Not really. Once he had gone to that penultimate step and shown that he meant business then death would lose its allure, for that was based on fear and ignorance and he would have dispelled the mystery and proved his fearlessness. He could despise death then. It would be to gain a species of immortality, for no man could die twice. Only maybe by then he would have grown so weary of the game it would seem the only way to regain reality. Maybe when that point was reached, that absolutely last moment, and you were alone with the death you had courted as with your new bride, then it would lose its terror and between you and it the barrier would drop and there would be nothing to prevent you from stepping over the borderline to consummation. How to express the terror you were sure to feel on discovering that you had lost your capacity for terror?

  As with the man resorting regularly to the bottle, who believes he can always quit and who discovers one day that he cannot, so with him: at some point the game ceased to be a game. Daily his fear of himself mounted. His took his alertness for inescapable vigilance. He despaired of outwitting an enemy so clever and so determined, one bent on his annihilation, who knew him so intimately and who foresaw and forestalled his every twist and dodge. When a man’s mind was luring him to destruction it became devilishly ingenious.