Mr. Suicide

by Nicole Cushing

  Dad stayed up for another hour or two, watching the Cincinnati Reds lose to Pittsburgh in extra innings. Then you heard him open the refrigerator’s freezer and get ice cream. You heard his spoon clang against the bowl. Heard the bowl clang against the sink. Then he, too, proceeded down the hallway to rest in bed next to your mother. You dug your fingernails into your palms and yearned for the house to finally quiet to a state of perfect stillness—no more sights, no more sounds.

  But it didn’t. Your father snored intermittently. The red numbers of your digital alarm clock kept advancing. 12:53… 12:54. Each moment that progressed toward morning inched you closer to sunrise and the deadline for your decision. Why did things have to keep happening? Why did time have to move forward? Why couldn’t you simply hibernate in this one dark moment and not emerge until you were ready?

  12:55. 12:56.

  You became teary-eyed. Thrashed around in your bed. Raked fingernails over your own arms, and liked the rawness of the resulting flesh. Then you did it to your face. Your neck. The stinging pain helped for awhile, distracted you from the torment of the clock moving forward over and over and over again. But you had only so much flesh to rake, and when you’d already scratched all the skin that was showing, you couldn’t take it any longer. You got up and unplugged the clock. In a fraction of a moment, the offending red numbers faded into oblivion. It was like you’d killed them.

  You were relieved to see the red lights go out. Felt, oddly, accomplished. Outside your window, evergreen branches rustled in a breeze and scratched against the glass. They made squeaky sounds. When you heard the branches, you heard something else, too.

  Whispering. Coming from the closet.

  You could not make out the words that were being said, but they were unpleasant-sounding. Spoken in a man’s voice, not so different from your own but not exactly your own. You paced around your room and tried raking your nails over your arms again, but found that it hurt too much to rake skin that had already been raked. You bit your lip, put on your glasses, and turned on the lights.

  The whispering didn’t stop.

  You walked toward the closet. Placed your hand on the door knob. Turned it. You looked down and saw your brother—the one you’d watched go insane—lying down on top of your shoes. He seemed in worse shape than the last time you’d talked to him. More disheveled. Less glued together. “It’s terrible here, isn’t it?” he whispered. “So terrible that you’re going to leave, huh?”

  Your breath started to huff out of you too quickly. You grabbed a hold of the chest of drawers to steady yourself. “H-how long have you been there?” you whispered back.

  “Two,” your brother said. Then he started sucking his thumb.

  “Two hours?”

  He took his thumb out of his mouth just long enough to offer up a nonsensical revision. “Seven.”

  “You’re going to have to get out of there.”

  He took his thumb out of his mouth again. Strands of slobber clung to it. “It is terrible, of course. But if you leave that will be terrible, too. Have you ever thought of that? Mom without the baby of the family? Haven’t you considered how… well… extreme her reaction might be?”

  They were the most rational words you’d heard come from him that night, but they held limited sway (coming, as they did, from the floor of your closet; coming, as they did, out of a mouth that had only moments before been sucking a thumb). “From the looks of it, you’d be able to slip into that role just fine. And, hey, how do you know I’m leaving? I haven’t made up my mind.”

  But that was a lie. You had made up your mind. You’d made up your mind, right then, when you saw your brother sucking his thumb at the bottom of your closet. Madness ran in the family. You half-hoped to contract it, because the very word connoted freedom from all the tiresome, fraudulent priorities of the ladder. But you were very certain that, if you were going to go mad, you wanted your madness to look different than that of the infantile man you were speaking with. If you were to go mad, you wanted it to be the sort of madness that took you away from the house. Not the sort that tethered you to it.

  Your brother shook his head. “You’re lying. You’re going to leave tonight. He told me so. And He would know.”

  “Who? Mr. Suicide?”

  “Not him… the heavier Someone. He said He was picking you, instead of me. Said you were more deserving. More… fascinating. He said you were ripe, and I’m not. He’s the more desirable of the two options. You know what I mean? I guess what I want to say is, He offers something far more complete than what Mr. Suicide offers. Mr. Suicide is like a peasant, and He’s like a king. And to emigrate to His kingdom, you have to be selected, and then you have to take your passport with you. There’s a whole set of rules governing it all. I would go, too, but He didn’t pick me. So I can’t. It sucks, but, yeah, I can’t. I guess that’s what I want to say. You know? You understand me? You should consider yourself lucky to be picked by Him. You should consider yourself really fucking lucky that He thinks you’re so goddamned fascinating.” And with those words, a sullen look overtook his face—a hideous, hard grimace. His whisper became brittle and hoarse. “I can be fascinating, too, you know.” His eyes oozed tears onto his cheeks, and he went back to sucking his thumb.

  Chosen? Fascinating? You wanted to know more, but the whole thing was too fucked up to keep looking at. You closed the closet door. You had stuff in there that would have been good to take with you when you left. A windbreaker for the rain and the cold. Extra shoes. But you decided to just let them stay in there. Your sneakers were parked by the front door. You had jeans and socks and underwear and T-shirts in the chest of drawers. Your backpack (the el cheapo one Mom had bought for you at the dollar store after you lost yours the day you played hooky) was on the floor next to your bed. You could access everything you really needed without disturbing your brother’s place in the closet. You removed textbooks you’d barely opened from your backpack and replaced them with three changes of clothes and of course, your now heavily-crinkled, creased, and smudged copy of Perfect Monsters.

  You walked out into the hallway. Strolled around the dark house. Said goodbye to it. You felt no nostalgia for the place. There was no sense of Oh, this is the room where we spent so many Sunday pancake breakfasts or This is where Mom hid Easter eggs or That’s where they put the Christmas tree each year. There was no sense of loss, in leaving the house. Just victory. I’ve won, you thought to yourself, as you put on your shoes.

  The sofa, the refrigerator, the kitchen table, the fireplace, the pictures on the wall, the knickknacks… you could barely see them in the light of the lone lamp you’d flicked on. You pushed all that stuff out of your mind. Pushed it out and embraced, instead, the darkness that obscured it.

  You didn’t have much money. You wondered if you should steal some from your mother’s purse. It lay on the living room couch, unprotected. You looked inside. She didn’t have any cash in there. You considered taking her credit cards, but they could be used to track you. You considered sneaking in to your parents’ room and taking cash from your father’s wallet, but you didn’t want to wake him. You considered delaying your departure until you’d saved a few hundred dollars. But that was what your mother would expect you to do, wasn’t it? That would buy her time to work against you, wouldn’t it? If she saw you saving, she’d know her baby was working toward leaving and she’d find some way to sabotage you.

  You couldn’t permit that. So you resigned yourself to the fact that you’d have to make a go of things with less than ten bucks in your pocket. You’d fetch food out of dumpsters. Maybe get meals at soup kitchens. You’d live on the streets. It would be uncomfortable, but an improvement over your current, claustrophobic existence. Life on the streets would be real. There would be no artifice.

  Like all dads in Louisville, your father owned a shotgun. Shooting it at an outdoor range was the closest thing to physical exercise he ever did. It was a harmless distraction; like golf or gin rummy but with
self-esteem benefits neither of those games could offer. It may have been the one place he felt powerful. Bullets assailed targets he selected. All he had to do was pull a trigger, and things exploded in the sky.

  He kept it in a cabinet, but the cabinet wasn’t locked. It hadn’t been locked since you were twelve. You thought about stealing it, so you’d have something with which to protect yourself. You picked it up. Stroked the barrel. It felt pleasantly cool and firm to the touch. Oddly erotic. You wanted it for your own. You figured Dad owed you something for being such a piss-poor role model. You told yourself that this could be the first installment payment in your compensation for damages.

  But it was hardly concealable. If only he’d owned a pistol, too. (But alas, his only other weapon was a bow—equally awkward.) So you put down the gun and placed it back in the cabinet.

  You mulled over the pros and cons of leaving a note to explain yourself. If you didn’t, then Mom would go full tilt hysterical and probably call the cops with suspicions you were kidnapped. That’s how dense she was. You didn’t have a lot to say to her. You grabbed a pen from a jar of pens on the kitchen table. You grabbed a small piece of paper from a pad kept near the land line, to write messages. You started scribbling.

  DON’T GO LOOKING FOR ME. YOU’LL NEVER FIND ME.

  And then you signed your name.

  You took the note and put it on your bed. Your brother still mumbled on, his words muffled by the closed closet door. “Fascinating too… ” then the smacking of lips against thumb. “Fascinating, too… ”

  You paced away as swiftly as you could without breaking into a jog. Down the hallway. Into the living room. Then you quickly went out the front door. The stairs wobbled beneath your feet, like they always did, and there was a moment of unsteadiness. But you did not stumble.

  From front door to sidewalk, from sidewalk to street, from street to intersection, until (finally) you escaped your subdivision. You aspired to go as far away as the public transportation system could take you. There was a bus stop a few blocks away, but the TARC system didn’t start running until six or seven. They had a bench at the stop, though. And so you sat there for a few hours and watched the traffic go by. At first, all the cars were night owls. You thought you recognized one of the cool kids from school drive past you. He was laughing and smoking something while grazing the yellow stripe.

  Then, as time ticked on, you heard the chatter of birds and saw the first hint of light. No more party people passed you. Now they were all adults en route to work. Many were in uniforms, of one sort or another. Similarly clad people started to assemble at the bus stop. It was better, so much better, than the school bus stop. Nobody here called you Trash Ass. Everyone minded their own business.

  When the bus showed up, the sign on top said it was the 53 Express. You’d never taken a TARC bus before. You weren’t sure how it all worked. The driver was a bald, black guy. You needed to get your bearings, so you asked him a question.

  “How far does this thing go?”

  He rolled his eyes at you, like he was annoyed to even acknowledge your presence. You defied the convention of sullenly getting on to the bus and not making any chit-chat, and he was annoyed by the anomaly. He turned up his radio. Three loud people on some morning show laughed through static.

  You took the steps up to where he sat and asked him again, louder. You’d just left eighteen years of being disrespected. You vowed to yourself you’d never be disrespected again. “How far does this thing go?”

  He looked at you like you just farted. “Downtown. Market Street. Take a map if you want one.”

  “And all I have to do is pay a buck seventy-five?”

  “Yeah. You gettin’ on?”

  You had no better plan.

  X

  The Ohio is an ugly, brown river flowing through ugly, gray towns. Sick blood coursing through a sicker heart. The Express bus traveled over I-64, granting you a view of it, and its bridges, and the southern Indiana shore on the other side. At one point, you wished for the dickhead driver to succumb to a stroke or heart attack, so that the entire vehicle—you and everyone else around you—might careen off the assigned route, past concrete barriers, and plunge into the river. That way, you could become tiny cells of sickness, at one with the sick blood.

  But that desire was only there for a moment. When it passed and no accident ensued, you felt a strange sensation.

  The best way you can describe it is as an unmooring. You felt like you imagined one of those tugboats in the river felt, after it dropped its load and left port. There was a sense, inside yourself, of drifting away. Separation. Release of burden. You had a strong intuition that you weren’t simply escaping your old life (that prison cell room in Hikes Point, those clattering knickknacks on the coffee table, that insane slapping woman who gave birth to you). No… it was more than that… somehow you were escaping life itself, or at least, life as you’d previously known it. Existence would be totally different now.

  This both thrilled and frightened you. Yes, home may have been a prison, but at least it had been a familiar one. Your current surroundings were decidedly unfamiliar. You were white, and Louisville was—practically—still a segregated city. Sure, the law said different. But nobody gave two fucks about the law. So you grew up mostly around other white kids with dads who worked at other factories.

  As the bus moved farther and farther downtown, more blacks and Mexicans got on. You fidgeted in your seat. Scratched your head. Stared at the other passengers, then pretended to not stare when they noticed you staring. Pretended that you’d been looking past them, perhaps at some sight that loomed outside their window. You think that convinced them you weren’t staring.

  Then you leaned back and sighed. I’m just on a merry little excursion, you thought to yourself. Just a pleasure-ride, that’s all. A tour of a decrepit city, via public bus. What could be better? Yes, it was like getting into a pool. It only seemed uncomfortable for the first few minutes, and then it felt good.

  You looked to the front of the bus and noticed a girl in a wheelchair sitting up there. How had she gotten on? You supposed the bus was equipped with a special lift to take on such passengers. You must have really been worked up when you’d boarded. How had you failed to notice her?

  Alas, probably because she was too young for you. She looked like she was about ten. The man next to her was probably her dad. Children, even the disabled ones, weren’t your thing. There were laws against messing with kids and you had no interest in running afoul of them. Besides that, you simply didn’t care for the looks of their bodies. Even the most deformed children retained an aura of photogenic, big-eyed baby about them. Therefore, children weren’t deranged enough to hold your interest. They had too few years of hurt under their belts.

  You hoped that an older girl in a wheelchair might come aboard, but that didn’t happen. So you just sat there, watching people disembark and virtually indistinguishable replacements stream on. Black, white, or Mexican, they all had the same feel about them. You didn’t know any of them, but you had a sense that if you did get to know them, you’d like them more than any of the kids you’d gone to school with.

  Not counting Cressida.

  ***

  You took the route as far as it would go. Got out on Market Street. Strolled around for awhile, getting your bearings.

  It was unseasonably warm for a late April morning. The heat seemed to melt the air itself, resulting in blurry ripples in the distance. The sun stung you. You began to sweat after only a minute.

  And yet, despite the physical discomfort, there was a certain psychological refreshment you found in abundance. There were other people walking around, too. A good dozen of them, treading the sidewalk either alone or in pairs or in trios. You’d never met any of these people before, but just by looking at them you felt a strong kinship. These were not People of the Ladder. Like you, they were people who lingered in the dark a few feet away from the ladder.

  Many also had backpack
s. Many, also, had escaped the chains of hygiene. Some of the women looked like whores. Some of the men looked like sleepwalkers. Occasionally you saw an infant among their number and felt jealous that it would, from its earliest days, get to revel in the sort of life you’d had to wait eighteen long years to participate in.

  Despite all the marching, there were no marching band girls to be found. There were no jocks, no preps, no kids who took Vo-Tech. No ladderly aspirations of any kind. The walking people exuded a deep, unspoken self-acceptance: this is who we are, we do not want what Ladder People want. The ladder is a lie: our world is the truth.

  You followed some of them, to see where they were heading. A small group: a man and two women, all frail and white and toothless and filthy and babbling in a way suggestive of significant mental retardation. They walked for what seemed like forever, over to the public library. You didn’t want their company but you were curious about what business they would transact there. The answer turned out to be, of course, none. They were getting out of the heat. They sat down at a cluster of study carrels, put their heads down, and occasionally farted and giggled. You shook your head at the waste of furniture. Yes you were part of their tribe, but you could make far better use of the library than they could.

  The staff wouldn’t let you on the computer because you didn’t have a library card. They wouldn’t let you have a library card because you didn’t have a driver’s license. So you spent the day flipping through the glossy pages of National Geographic. Sometimes, they showed tits. They weren’t misshapen tits. They were tits on women from remote islands in the Pacific. Nothing like Perfect Monsters, but still interesting. You were tempted to take the issue into the men’s room and jack off to it, but something made you decide not to. You supposed you didn’t because you figured someone else might have the same idea, and after your run-in with Andrew-in-the-park you didn’t want to see any more pervs.