Mr. Suicide

by Nicole Cushing

  “I lost it,” you said. “It was in my backpack. I lost them both.”

  “Again! This is the third phone we’ve gotten you since you were twelve, and you lose every single one.” She crossed her arms. Gritted her teeth. “And that backpack, too? I don’t believe you. This is a trick, to hide your phone from me so I can’t take it away. To hide your backpack from me so I can’t search it for drugs!”

  You had to make up a story. Something she’d find believable. “I think I lost them over by the bus stop. I put them down, one day, I don’t even remember when, and then—just like that—they were gone. I looked and looked, but wasn’t able to find them. I think maybe one of the other kids took them.”

  Her face turned red. “Lies! That’s the same thing you said the last time you ‘lost’ your phone. You sold it, didn’t you. Sold it for drugs. That’s it. It makes sense, now. You’re on drugs! You traded your phone for them, didn’t you? Well, you won’t be getting another phone from your father and me! We aren’t going to aid and abet you in your filthy habits!”

  You told her you’d swear on the Bible that you’d never taken drugs. You told her you didn’t care at all about not having a cell phone. Told her that, in fact, you preferred it.

  She demanded you empty your pockets. She searched your coat. Then she searched your room, looked through your underwear drawer. Your desk drawers. In your pillow cases. Under your bed. She even went so far as to remove books from your book shelf, thinking that you might have hidden the phone (or the drugs you’d allegedly purchased with your phone) in between two paperbacks.

  While she was at it, she also confiscated a couple of paperbacks—your The Catcher in the Rye and an old Harry Potter book. It was as though she wasn’t going to be happy unless she found something to take away from you, and fell back on religious objections to justify it.

  She pointed at Catcher. “The Christian Parents Network has a warning about this one. It teaches disobedience,” she said. “Disobedience and vulgarity and blasphemy!” Then she pointed at Harry Potter. “Witchcraft! The demonic, dressed up all nice and handsome like a decent young man, but not a decent young man. No, not at all.”

  You wanted to go ahead and belt her again. That would at least shut her up. But you didn’t want to have another conversation with Officer Douchebag Collins (or any other officer, for that matter). Besides, if this was what she needed to focus on to get her mind off your cell phone, so be it. There was something to be said for picking your battles. Instead of giving her a good clobbering over this, you decided to let her have the illusion of victory. That way, she’d shut up about the cell phone and eventually leave.

  She sat on the floor, ripping the brown and yellow cover off of Catcher. Grinning. Sweating. There was a sick glee she exuded as she destroyed something she thought you held dear. It wasn’t a big deal, though. You’d gotten the book at a school library sale. Spent all of fifty cents on it. Hadn’t even read it, yet, because whenever you tried reading any book these days you couldn’t concentrate. So you didn’t say a word about it. Just let her do her thing.

  Same with Harry Fucking Potter (who found himself literally trampled under your mother’s foot, then heaved—all gazillion pages of him—against the wall with a thud).

  “If he’s a warlock, then you probably should burn him,” you said. “Instead of wrestling with him.”

  She sneered and picked the Harry Potter book up off the floor. Took it with her into the living room. “The book’s getting tossed into the trash. It’s the author, and all those who read her, who will be cast in fire on Judgment Day. And if you don’t believe me, bear in mind, I’m not the one who says that, God does.”

  And with that, she went off to the kitchen and dumped the shredded remains of Catcher and the trodden corpse of Harry Potter in the trash can. You then heard her turn on the TV. She started chuckling at Drew Carey on The Price is Right.

  ***

  You hurried through your online school work as quickly as you could, not really caring about getting the answers right. You finished the assignments in the afternoon of the first day of your suspension. You just wanted to get them finished so that you could say that you’d completed them. Afterward, you crawled in bed and put the cool, refreshing pillow over your face.

  The next two days you stayed in your room, in bed, but pretended to still be at work on the assignments. On those days, your mother seemed far less interested in you than she’d been before. Overnight, she’d become withdrawn—absorbed into some deep, dynamic thought process to which you weren’t privy.

  When you ventured out to the kitchen for lunch, she didn’t say a word to you. She was crocheting, and so absorbed in it that she didn’t even seem to notice you were in the same room with her.

  Later that afternoon, when you went out to grab a pop from the fridge, she was in the living room reading the Bible while Jerry Springer blared on the TV. She sat in her rocking recliner. She was rocking over and over. Looking at her more closely, she appeared to not have slept the night before. Her hair was frizzy and tangled. Her eyes were bloodshot and had dark shadows under them. She should have been reclining, not rocking.

  She didn’t even have dinner on the table at six. You didn’t mind, though. Neither did your brother. You both fixed yourself some cereal. You both seemed relieved to not have to go through the motions of a Happy Family Dinner. You offered to make your mother a bowl of cereal. She muttered something about not being hungry, and then kept reading her Bible. When you’d been out there earlier, she was at the very start of it. Apparently in Genesis. Now, she was leafing through the end of the volume’s onionskin pages. Revelation. Obviously she’d been skimming, not reading.

  She had a savage, sexual expression on her face. You jerked your glance away from her when you realized the expression wasn’t just an expression. The Bible sat on her lap. As her left hand flipped pages, she tucked her right hand in her crotch. She was bucking her hips against it. Grunting. Panting. The recliner squeaked with each motion.

  You went back to your room and tried to forget you’d seen what you’d seen. Tried erasing the mental image from your mind. But you couldn’t.

  ***

  The worst part of returning to school was finding out your grades on the assignments you’d completed online, while suspended. They, predictably, ranged from average to poor. They didn’t help your cause any.

  Mom followed through on her promise to have you removed from gifted and talented classes. There was a meeting between her and some teachers, just to make it all official. When you returned from suspension, you were in classes with not-quite-smart, not-quite-dumb kids. Some of the classes used books you’d used the previous year.

  In theory this could’ve been a chance to have a clean slate. Make new friends. That sort of thing. But the medium-level kids pretty much hated you on sight. They sized you up easily. They knew something your mother and the teachers didn’t: you weren’t one of them.

  The homework was easier, but you still didn’t bother doing it. After all, it wasn’t the degree of difficulty that had prevented you from doing your homework in the more advanced classes. It was that you didn’t care. If anything, you cared even less about school after your demotion.

  You spent a lot of time in your room, and Mom didn’t pester you much about that. Right after you’d punched her, you’d told her that things were going to be different, from then on out. You didn’t really believe it yourself, when you’d said it. But the awesome thing was: you were right, sort of. After the initial tongue-lashing from Dad and the two or three evenings Mom cried and put you on a guilt trip about her medical bills, it was all over.

  Your mother didn’t want to admit to herself that what had happened, happened. Dad had to replace the bathroom door and that made him grumpy, but when all was said and done he took his cues from Mom. After two or three days, things were almost back to normal. No more tongue-lashings. No more guilt trips.

  In some ways, breaking your mother’s nose was
the best thing you’d ever done. You felt less angry in the days afterward, like the violence had released a lot of pent-up anger.

  You wondered about Andrew-from-the-park. You were pretty sure he wasn’t going to press charges either (or for that matter, even contact the cops). Sure, you hurt him, but—just like with Mom—you only hurt him because you had to.

  In any event, given what he was up to at the time, the cops were probably the last people that dude wanted to talk to. But still, you never knew, did you? He could always claim he was minding his own business when he was attacked by an unkempt youth. Your backpack was still at the scene of the crime. (As was your peroxide.)

  You had nothing in the backpack that would lead people to know it was yours, though. No school assignments, no identifying information of any sort. So, at least there was that. It would be a puzzling sight for a stranger to run across—your backpack with a bottle of peroxide just sitting there in a wooded area, a few clumps of soggy toilet paper nearby. Maybe your possessions would stay there forever. It was a secluded area. Maybe no one would ever discover them, not even for years. That idea appealed to you. You thought you’d maybe even go back there, someday, and think about those few moments of bliss you’d enjoyed, when things were quiet and your eyes were soaked in the blessed blackness.

  VI

  In the summer after your junior year, you spent a lot of time in your room with the pillow over your eyes. Your mother didn’t replace the peroxide bottle that you’d left at the park. She didn’t even notice it was missing. You still wanted the darkness, but you’d abandoned your only tools to obtain it. You couldn’t even go walk to the park to retrieve them. She had you on a tight leash.

  She’d never consented for you to take driver’s ed. Said you were too nervous to handle it, that you’d accidentally kill yourself in a wreck.

  She didn’t allow you to get a summer job, either. She said that your grades proved you couldn’t handle such responsibilities. She said she needed you to help clean the house. She told you to scrub out the bathtub twice a week.

  You did those things. You thought, once again, about killing her. Mr. Suicide came back, as well, to remind you that he was an option. “Your brother still lives here, remember that,” he said. “There’s no getting out. She has control and she isn’t about to lose it.”

  I turn eighteen next April, you reminded him. I can gut it out until I get out.

  “You’re one tough son of a bitch (no pun intended),” Mr. Suicide said. “But the line between bein’ a tough son of a bitch and a crazy son of a bitch is pretty damned gray. I think you’re fixin’ to cross over it, if I do say so, myself. Like your brother before you.”

  I’ll never be like my brother!

  Mr. Suicide started to giggle. “I wonder if his ears are burning. Or, better than that, I wonder if he can hear me. As you so often lament, the walls are quite thin. And you may have already guessed that I’ve spoken to other members of your family, too. Maybe he hears me through the wall and recognizes my voice. You’re not my only prospect here. Sadly, not even the most promising prospect here. Every time I start to think you and I are ready to close the deal, you go off and get some brief attachment to someone, or you get all candy-ass on me and opt for self-mutilation, instead. Good thing there are other people here in this house who listen to what I have to say. Good thing I don’t have to go out of my way to visit you. Because if I did, I might write you off as hopeless.”

  I don’t want my brother to kill himself.

  Mr. Suicide mocked you, taking on a faggoty tone as he mimicked you. “I don’t want my bwutha to kill himsewlf,” he whined. “When did you become Mr. Compassionate? And, hey, who said I was talking about your brother? There are two other people under this roof, you know?”

  I don’t want anyone else in this house to kill themselves.

  “That’s a lie,” Mr. Suicide said. “You wouldn’t bat an eyelash if a certain M-O-M did herself in.”

  You’re trying to throw me off the trail. I know better than to think she’d kill herself. She’s too happy making all of us miserable to want to kill herself. She doesn’t even think about stuff like that. You’re talking to my brother, aren’t you?

  No answer.

  Aren’t you?

  “I’m under no obligation to go into details.”

  Look, why do you have to drag all of my family into this? I thought this was just between you and me.

  “No man is an island,” Mr. Suicide said. “You’re all connected by your foul genetics. You are all merely tributaries of the same polluted river, and that river is called Insanity. There is no way to avoid it. It’s your destiny to go mad. Or perhaps another metaphor will better explain it: insanity is the highway on which you’re traveling. I’m the only off-ramp.”

  You told Mr. Suicide, once again, to fuck off. And the voice (yes, now you were certain, an audible voice… not your own thoughts) did as it was told. But did he simply move to another room of the house? Maybe pass through the wall to torment your brother? You didn’t want that. You couldn’t really say that you loved him. He’d called the cops on you, after all, and you were still plenty pissed off about that. But you didn’t wish him ill.

  So you were greatly relieved when, mere moments after Mr. Suicide left, there was an unfamiliar knock on the door. Not the five quick knocks that were your mother’s signature. No, only two knocks that were barely knocks. Knocks that sounded more like fingernails scraping the door than actual knocks. You rolled off the bed and shuffled toward the door. Opened it. It was your brother. He looked back and forth, as though trying to make certain no one was watching. He had a manilla envelope in his hand. “Let me in,” he whispered, “before she sees us.”

  You did as he asked.

  The two of you spoke in hushed tones. Not exactly in whispers but not in a normal tone of voice, either.

  “I heard him,” your brother said. “I heard him talking to you. I thought he was going to get you, but it looks like you told him what’s what, huh? I mean, you know… he’s not going to convince you to kill yourself.”

  You felt a tightness, a pinching in your stomach. You felt yourself shrinking away from him, the way you would from a dead bird or a pile of dog shit. Your disgust was not quite rational (after all, you’d already admitted to yourself Mr. Suicide was real). And yet, rational or not, you felt it.

  Your reaction didn’t escape your brother’s notice. “The walls are thin,” he reminded you (as if you needed any reminding). “And I’m right next door, so of course I’m going to hear things.”

  “Can Mom and Dad hear him, too?”

  “I think they do, but pretend they don’t. They’re good at that, you know? Pretending things aren’t happening, I mean. You know… like… not to make you feel bad, but when you beat up Mom, she pretended like it didn’t really happen. You know, like how we never talk about it any more, and it’s almost like things are back to normal. Like it never really happened. She’s good at that, you know. Pretending, I mean. Pretending that things don’t really happen.”

  You thought back to the day he first went mad. The thrashing. The sobbing. The way Mom and Dad just sat there instead of getting him help. The way you knew no one in that house would ever get help. He was mad, and even he knew that your mother ignored things she had no right to ignore. You might well be going mad, and even you knew it. So maybe they overhear the voice, but pretend it’s only the television, you thought. And that made perfect sense to you.

  “I couldn’t make out all the words,” your brother said, “but I could make out his tone, you know? He’s a sarcastic p-pain in the ass.”

  You figured this meant that Mr. Suicide had targeted your brother, before you. (How else would he know the voice?) You asked, “So, he’s tried to convince you, too?”

  “Yeah, but… but I found; well… how do I?… what I mean is… I found some salvation… I’m not g-gonna kill myself because the ugliness isn’t as awful as I thought. See, here’s the thing… my gu
ess is that you haven’t… well… I mean… how do I put this?… you haven’t seen the best parts of ugliness.” He giggled softly. Blushed. “I mean… well, that is… if you open your eyes to the best parts of ugliness, then there are answers. Better answers, at least, than what Mr. Suicide can offer.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  He handed you the manilla envelope. “Mr. Suicide isn’t my Master.” He giggled. “There’s something better out there. Something… I can’t quite find the right words… but… well, something heavier.” He shook his head, correcting himself. “No, not something, someone. Someone heavier.” He chuckled. “Someone grander. The grandest Someone of all. And the road to meeting Him starts with taking a look inside this envelope. He told me to pass this on to you, and I must always obey Him. You know. What I mean is, obeying… that’s the only choice. You know?”

  Then he giggled some more. Blushed. Looked inside the envelope. Scratched his neck. “I looked inside the envelope and liked what I saw there. Liked it so much, I kind of over-used it. Apologies for that, in advance.”

  “Again, what the fuck are you talking about?”

  “J-just look inside the envelope, okay? But promise me something: you have to hide it. Don’t let Mom find it or else we’ll both be in big trouble, okay? Do I have your promise?”

  “Don’t let Mom find what?”

  He shook his head. Cleared his throat. “The e-envelope, dumbass. Hide it someplace she won’t find it. Maybe in your closet? I dunno. I mean, after all the stunts you’ve pulled, she might try to search your closet to prove you aren’t taking drugs. I think they’re worried, you know, about you taking drugs. Anyway, all I mean is… put it someplace she won’t find it or both of us are gonna be in a lot of trouble, okay? I hid it in my baseball card album on my book shelf. Tucked it into the inside pocket, and no one has found it yet, you know?”

  You didn’t have a baseball card album anymore. You’d thrown yours out years ago. But you nodded and told him you’d find a place for it.