Drafts of a Suicide Note Read online

  Now, is this the crux of the portfolio? Or are this page and the next irrelevant (AS4, AS5), mixed in with her papers when somebody Javon-like dropped a bunch of files? Maybe we’ll never know. But I think Aetna’s bitterness turned acrid, her thoughts obsessive. Serious ideations (AS6): detailed, organized, feasible. Enter rage and violence (AS7), and at last her intention is unmistakable (AS8). She tidies her affairs (AS9), scribbles the denouement all in a rush (AS10) like she’s run out of time. Or she can’t bear to give herself the time to change her mind.

  One problem. The Ten are rife with contradictions. It’s not a matter of imprecision. Her words, styles, even inks were scrupulously deployed. The problem is the fact that there are ten.

  You wonder how she died, for example. AS1 suggests poison. Suicidological studies indicate poison as a favored method among authors of suicide notes. But you could also argue, based on AS6, that the author of AS1 displays a preference for a gunshot to the head.

  And anyway, Aetna Simmons is nothing less than a suicidologist’s worst nightmare. Their statistics show that seventy to eighty-five percent of suicides don’t bother leaving notes at all, and of those who do, the intent is to issue instructions and explain themselves. But in her verbose obscurity, Aetna defies them all. She’s a textbook exemplar of Pestian’s intrapsychological theory of suicidal feelings, Joiner’s opposing theory that such feelings stem from thwarted interpersonal relationships, and nuanced theories that agree and disagree with both. She suits almost all of Durkheim’s and Améry’s classifications. Anomic, egoistic, fatalistic suicide. Dozing and balanced and short-circuit suicide. Revenge-suicide. Blackmail-suicide with a pinch of self-murder-by-ordeal.

  One class she eludes. Altruistic suicide. This category is for people who dive in front of bullets meant for others. It covers kamikaze pilots, certain cases of seppuku. Dying for someone as opposed to dying-because-of.

  Conclusions? Aetna Simmons had a cornucopia of reasons to quit this barbaric life. Love wasn’t one of them.

  Consider the following syllogism. Art is often made for audiences. The ten suicide notes of Aetna Simmons were written and compiled for an audience. Therefore the ten suicide notes of Aetna Simmons are a work of art after a fashion.

  Note the similarities between the ten source documents and a collection of poems, an oeuvre, a musical suite, a portfolio. An artwork is a representation, a trace of some creative act. The creative act consists of an ideation followed by a flying leap into the unknown. The artist leaps at something—some language, some convention, a rock, a tube of paint—bent on taking it apart and building something dreadful from the wreckage. But she’s never sure she hasn’t launched herself into a void. She suspects all her daring will never lull the ravenous keening of her idea, and she cannot undo anything. This expression and dubious release, this destruction in creation’s name, this is the potential that art shares with death.

  Call this the Aesthetic Hypothesis: Aetna Simmons’ suite-portfolio narrates and performs being-toward-death, the puissant consciousness that life is ruin. Each note is a frame in an open-ended drama, and the entire corpus is a movement that is paradoxically static, a performance and an object in a single effort to which the act of suicide is absolutely integral. She arranged to be nothing but ten papers in a column and the drama of their words. A Foucauldian might say it was a case of suicide as somebody’s life’s work, and as there could be no work more beautiful and bold, that someone was an artist.

  What conspired to make me think and write in bygone modes that even now awaken stale regret tinged with fresh ire? My resentment and sense of drama were alive and unhealthy; and as for their conspirators, one was a dream, another was a storm. A third was a certain dearth.

  Since Harvard I had suffered not a single worthy notion, nope. My thoughts were mundane and melancholy, often running in circles like certain shredder blades. Everything seemed superfluous, a way to kill time while I waited for who knows what. Was it that I’d outgrown the staid old scholarly forms? I don’t think so. I tried my hand at fiction. You’d think I’d be good at it since I’m quite a character. But it got depressing. The drought played havoc with my nerves.

  It was a relief when the ultimate memoranda of Aetna Simmons came along. Of course from her point of view I might’ve ruined everything. She wanted to pass out of the world, not to be immortalized as an accidental maestro of a literary form. But that ceased to concern me as other, dire matters took its place.

  Which brings me to my dream. One night when my hypothesis was young, I dreamed about the last written words of Aetna Simmons.

  I’m in a big American bookstore. I hunt for books with my name on the spine.

  For the record, in the recurring-nightmare version of this dream, I don’t find what I’m looking for. Not even in Bargain Books. I panic and run around because there’s a giant shadow chasing me and laughing. I look for a place to curl up with my arms over my head. But I can’t find that either.

  That’s not what happens this time. There’s still a giant shadow chasing me and laughing. I’m still panicking and running around. And there still aren’t any books with my name on the spine. But this time, frantic for a hiding place, I happen to dash behind Noteworthy Paperbacks.

  All the Noteworthy books are black. No writing on the covers, no title, no author, nothing. Just this sort of lacquer that makes the books seem like pools of dark water.

  I’m terrified of these Noteworthy books. I figure it’s because I don’t know what they are; I don’t know what I’d have to do to make them my Noteworthy books. I’m expecting semicircles to show up in the pools, and they’ll rise and become scales and spikes and the sinuous horned neck of a ryuu.

  Maybe I only think that because each black book has a pair of built-in bookmarks, ribbons that start out red but change color, wriggling and flowing like the tentacles around the jaws of the sea-dragon. The very sea-dragon who attacked that diver in the old legend because she’d stolen the magic antidote for the agony of grief. Fleeing the ryuu, the ama slashed her breast open and hid the antidote inside it. I don’t know who the nepenthe belonged to in the first place, the ryuu or the ama. And I think the latter died of self-inflicted slashes. And this isn’t really how the legend goes, it’s just how I dreamed it. But anyway, I’m convinced the bookmarks are sidewhiskers of a ryuu rising out of each black book which is really a shard of ocean. I’m about to freak out and run away.

  But suddenly I know something else. I know, as I know now that I’m typing with my own two hands, that in those black books are the final written words of Aetna Simmons. And I’m no longer afraid.

  I’m about to pick up one of them. I reach for a wet, oily spine. But there’s someone behind me. I turn, ready to bolt, expecting the gigantic giggling shadow ready to eat me—

  But it’s Masami. Expressionless in a gray business suit. I debate running away. And maybe I’m about to. But she holds out her hand to me. She gives me a feather. Long as my arm and of a shimmering, uncertain, silverish color.

  When I wake up, I feel like wasted time and space.

  Which brings me to the storm. The ocean punished the beach. Longtails darted to their cliffside holes. Casurinas trembled. Heavy clouds sapped the colors from the flowers. People stocked up on tarpaulins and candles. The wind hurled itself at battened shutters like a desperate prisoner. Swells overwhelmed the wall of reefs around our island-archipelago, flooded the volcanic crater in which Bermuda glimmers like the wick of a candle. Surfers grabbed their boards and threw themselves at the feet of doom.

  It shouldn’t have been surprising that Martin canceled his trip. He’d postponed it once already. First it had to do with work, then the storm brought a puff of wind. Next thing we know, Martin’s refusing to get on the plane. I wondered if he was toying with us, but Martin’s not that subtle. I asked Nabi if he was scared of the Bermuda Triangle.

  She said, “Go head, bye, get crackin
.”

  Martin hung around about two weeks in which resentment turned me into a curmudgeon. Me: smart, sleek, spicy, life of the party, cavorting in riotous luxury beside the sea. My sublime ocean view looked like a bad drawing, my Miró and all my books became vapid. As I wandered my exclusive wasteland of empty hours, the last words in a vanished life became my days and nights.

  I told Nabi I’d written an essay. Acegirl got all excited. “See? Told you it wasn’t gonna last, didn’t I tell you? You just stick with it, you beautiful genius, you.”

  Another night, another club, another idgit. Tony heard me loud and clear as I read the usual fine print. What you are about to ingest/inject/inhale is a one-hundred-percent unique designer product that is unavailable anywhere else in the world. Resales and every other form of cost-carrying redistribution are nonpermissible. Cashier’s checks, corporate checks, personal checks, credit cards, debit cards, gift cards, bitcoin, Wells Fargo, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and whatever other idiotic schemes they come up with that aren’t real money are unacceptable forms of payment. These are non-negotiable terms. Any violation thereof will result in the immediate termination of our relationship and, should violations continue, legal ramifications in which I will inevitably hold the upper hand. Please acknowledge your understanding of the terms and conditions at this time.

  I got to the club, headed for the bar, bestowed a shoulder-clap on a client who was deep in conversation and made a decent job of acting surprised. Fancy meeting you here, thrilling twist of fate. I pretended to be astounded, though he’d given me a small mountain of money that morning. We shook hands. I slipped him a black envelope the size of a local postage stamp. And he asked if it was true, was my father running for Parliament?

  “Truth is, I hadn’t noticed,” I said.

  The client, whose pupils were already negligible, took this as a terrific joke. Which it was, all things considered. That man was so parenthetical to my upbringing a half-decent editor would’ve gone ahead and struck him out.

  I said, “Best make sure my passport’s up to date, I guess.” Another shoulder-clap and the dazzling grin of yours truly won roars of laughter from the client and his interlocutor, the latter being a well-to-do individual who is himself in government and who later that night became another client.

  Having acquainted him with Hallelujah, I’m dutifully nodding at some drawn-out tale of his, got the charm turned up to eleven, when Tony puts his arm around me like he owns me.

  “Hey, yeah, Tony Trent, Paragon Re, how are you, if I could borrow my friend here for a just a second, have him right back to you in a jiffy, thanks.”

  Fast talker, fast everything. American expat. He was wining and dining the CFO from Paragon’s Hartford office. I introduced myself as a partner in Bermuda’s first CSDS-accredited, NAID-certified, MWMA-recommended, AAA document destruction company. I bragged that Bull’s Head Shreds is the first Bermudian destruction company whose procedures have been formally acknowledged as FISMA-, FACTA-, and HIPAA-compliant, prepared to manage documents of top-level clearance. With an auditable, unbreakable, closed-loop chain of custody (CoC) that guarantees every assignment an internationally recognized Certificate of Destruction (CoD), we handle destructive security for the Bermuda government and corporate clients of all sizes, local and overseas, whom we serve with incontestable discretion. And you know, we don’t just shred, we disintegrate.

  “Empyreal!” said Tony, styling it as an expression of awe. “You must show Bill your MG. He’s a collector.”

  “Cool runnings, mon!” said Bill.

  I said, “Bermuda, not Jamaica. And Jamaicans don’t talk like that.”

  “No problem, mon!”

  Bill had a Dark ’n’ Stormy in his hand. Tony looked for a manhole to crawl into.

  “Now that’s a piece of history!” said Bill.

  My MG. That’s where I named my price, Bill failed to bat an eye, and I delivered the fine print. Brand new client, I’d never have forgotten, and Tony was right there, watching his meal ticket fondle my car. Night after night I’m putting up with this shit. Bill slavered as he gave me four grand, and I gave him a blue jewelry box. The box had ten pills in it. Like small, exquisite pearls.

  It comes with a spiel. I have a stance to go with the spiel. It’s a stance like I’m conducting a minuet, and the clichés work every time. “Empyreal is a thousand times more luxurious than the most perfect wine. It’s nuanced, subtle, puissant, and undeniable like the perfect woman. An exclusive experience which only the most discerning connoisseur can appreciate. Gentlemen, behold a glimpse of a higher plane, an elevated perspective where all the world is ripe.”

  Those idiots had no idea what I was on about. They nodded anyway. It’s a tendency among my clients to agree with everything I say. This can be annoying though of course it’s convenient. And opportunities for florid prose are rare these days.

  “Now, what you tell yourself is up to you, but I cannot exaggerate. Empyreal is nothing less than pure perfection, which, being perfect, offers one question alone. Are you ready?”

  Tony was like a bobblehead. Idgit made a purchase just for himself.

  According to her obit, which included her final sendoff’s date and time, Mrs. Trimm belonged to St. Peter’s Church in St. George’s. Her family chose St. John’s for her funeral. This may have had to do with its central location in Pembroke, its proximity to the Anglican cemetery, or the parking lot out back, all of which St. Peter has to do without.

  The lot overflowed. I squeezed my MG into a line of cars on the side of the road, hugging the cemetery wall. Inside I found a spot near the back with a pair of older ladies. We greeted each other softly and tried to look somber.

  The ladies were in dark dresses with elaborate hats. They chattered in stage whispers, even giggled some. Understandable if Myrtle Trimm was anything like my relatives. And these ladies weren’t necessarily relatives. Maybe they’d shared a seat with Mrs. Trimm on the ferry. Maybe they went to the same post office. Perhaps they were just in the neighborhood, starved for entertainment. For what reasonable purpose was I at that funeral?

  The ladies looked around. One said, “Girl, if there’s any of us here who’s half as healthy as Miz Myrtle, we should all be dead.”

  “Got dat right. Goes to show, innit. De Lord says it’s ya time, it’s ya time.”

  I think I felt a bit like people who make pilgrimage to Stonehenge after reading Thomas Hardy, wondering what was in his writing besides writing. When Aetna Simmons disappeared, only one person showed a smidgen of concern, penurious though it may have been; one person willing to vouch that the woman ever existed. One note out of ten had a specific addressee.

  The Gazette’s early reports on Aetna’s disappearance mentioned Mrs. Trimm by name. Anonymity’s barely more than a witticism around here in any case. The ladies in my pew speculated that the sudden loss of her tenant, her income’s subsequent nosedive, the press and the police and all the strain were just too much for poor Myrtle. And as the organ began to play, one old biddy peeked around my chest and wiggled her fingers.

  “Look, it’s Clara. How are you, sweetie?”

  I don’t know why I looked. Maybe it’s an instinct built into human genes, left over from the days when we hunted and were hunted in small herds on the savanna. All we had were our bare hands and inborn sense of community; one head turns, everyone turns, could be a saber-toothed tiger lurking in the grass.

  Clara was more buffalo than tiger. But the other people. The man and the woman who slipped behind her as she stopped to chat with the old biddies. Panic sent a heat wave through my face.

  They made their way to the front. The tall, sleek, black man was Barrington Caines. He’s negligible.

  But the tiny Japanese woman permitting Barrington to clear her path to the front of the church. She was bewitching even in her advanced years and severe trouser suit. All the men in her
chosen pew stood as she passed. Barrington remained standing until she sat down.

  Masami Okada-Caines. No mere tiger but a dragon. Her claws are dipped in platinum, her diamond-wrought fangs infused with deadly venom.

  They didn’t acknowledge me. They must’ve seen my car. Or maybe they forgot I have one. My hand kept running through my hair, a compulsion to make sure my face was hidden. The dragon has oni coursing through her veins. I was sure she’d turn and look. What the fuck were those two doing at a crazy old biddy’s funeral? Who the hell was Myrtle Trimm?

  The corpse gliding by. A shriveled twig inside a coffin. The face: unfamiliar, as it should be. The first I heard of her was from Javon. It was the first, I’m sure of it, but then why should those two give a damn? Discomposed, I almost missed the main event.

  From what Aetna Simmons wrote, I’d deduced that Mrs. Trimm had an estranged daughter or sister, possibly living overseas. I was right: she had a daughter. The minister announced that he’d personally deliver a special tribute written by Myrtle’s beloved Doreen, who I assumed was too broken up to do it herself. Masami glanced at her watch.

  The plan was to sit through the service, get a sense of the atmosphere that Mrs. Trimm had left behind. Then hang around, mingle, drop a few questions. But I couldn’t let the dragon catch my scent. Better leave now, I thought, get up, feign an attack of sobbing, but silent, silent, get the car—

  I froze. In horror, I think, and anger. I wanted to leave the church with a whole lot of noise. I wanted my business phone to ring. Why not shove off from the pew with a clatter and a curse, begin my conversation before I reached the door? Let them turn, those two down in front, let them look and see my back.