Stories like these can be found from the Punic Wars to the end of World War Two, when, in the face of advancing Russian forces, thousands of German civilians killed themselves rather than face the horrors they had been warned the Russians would force upon them. In the town of Demmin alone, one thousand people are reported to have committed suicide, most by drowning themselves in one of the three rivers that flowed through town. As in Masada, those with children made the grisly decision to kill their young first, weighing them down with stones and tossing them into the deep.
In 2003, in India, 1,707 committed suicide in the face of record crop failure. Three years later, in the province of Vidarbha, 767 farmers are reported to have killed themselves in all the ways that people do: by rope, by fire, by gun. During the same period in Japan, lonely citizens formed assisted-suicide groups online, using anonymous screen names. In sixty reported cases, more than 180 people took sleeping pills and then blocked the exhaust pipes of their cars, turning them into mobile gas chambers. The Japanese, of course, had a long and storied history when it came to organized suicide. At the end of WWII, in addition to the fabled kamikaze pilots, who would crash their fighter planes into enemy ships, the emperor ordered civilians to commit “sudan jiketsu.” When US troops took Saipan, hundreds of Japanese men, women, and children leaped off a cliff into the ocean. Hundreds more leaped to their death from two high cliffs at Marpi Point, later named Suicide Cliff and Banzai Cliff. Sometimes parents would slit their children’s throats before throwing them over the edge and following them.
Perhaps you’ve noticed a theme in these deaths—a sense of foreboding. The enemy approaches, circling like wolves. Death feels inevitable, but more concerning is the fear of what fresh horrors will come first. Rape and torture. Shame and humiliation.
Then there are the tales of religious leaders and their devoted followers. We know them well by now. Jim Jones and his Kool-Aid massacre, Heaven’s Gate’s thirty-nine acolytes found poisoned in their beds, wearing thirty-nine pairs of matching Nike sneakers, or perhaps you’re familiar with the story of fifty-three members of the Solar Temple blowing themselves to smithereens.
In 1682 Tsar Feodor ordered the leader of a Russian Christian sect known as the Old Believers to be put to death, burning him alive. In response, thousands of Old Believers locked themselves in churches around the country and set themselves on fire.
They too believed the end was near, and rather than wait for the inevitable, they vowed to take control, because dying by your own hand was a choice. A way to wrestle your mortality back from the gods of cruelty and chance.
Was this what our children were doing? Killing themselves before outside forces could erase them? And yet, if so, who was the enemy at the gates, and why couldn’t we see them too?
Simon
It’s in and out from there. Bits of memory, feelings, smell. Simon’s mind is blank. Was there a car ride? An elevator? He remembers a homeless man with his pants down, squatting by the side of the road. Before or after a freeway overpass passing overhead? The memories have the feeling of dream, a story told out of order. The stick of the first needle is lost to time, but there have been countless since. Clear fluids pressed through glass tubes into his veins. And then sleep. Or not sleep precisely, but empty waking. The void. Existence without identity. Fluorescent lighting, meals delivered in soft piles. Bars on the windows. When the dose runs out, clarity seeps in. His name. Simon. And Claire. He remembers Claire.
But then she is there. The face from his dreams, eyes full of teeth.
The Witch.
She comes with the needle, and Simon is underwater. How much times passes this way? A week? A month? He is in a house near a highway in a city. At night he can hear the radial whoosh and rumble. Time is a clock with no hands. This is the mental hospital reality he feared when his parents sent him to Float originally, back when he was having three or four panic attacks a day. Fourteen going on ninety. He envisioned men in white coats administering a Jack Nicholson lobotomy, the big Indian smothering him out. But that was then, before the hugs and the equine therapy of his expensive retreat, before Louise and the Prophet, before soft boundaries for rich kids.
Here he is suppressed. His riches don’t matter. His humanity doesn’t matter. He is a non-person, reduced to absence. A fifteen-year-old boy alone in a strange house with bars on the windows, locked down in an insane asylum for one. Outside the sun shines hard, baking the concrete, the sky a cloudless desert above. It’s a one-story house, surrounded on all sides by bleached stucco, set back off the street. The windows are shrouded with heavy fabric, but from time to time he manages to peer out. The front and back yards are paved, Mexico City style, dusty weeds growing up through ribbons and cracks. Could he be in Mexico? Sometimes he hears the oompah of Latin music pumping from bass speakers. Inside, the air-conditioning is set at maximum. He feels refrigerated, his body shivering so hard it feels his bones will break.
F is for frigid, they freeze him to death.
Not to mention, there is a smell in this place. A tenement stew. Cabbage boiled in salty water. The unspeakable parts of a pig. The smell from his dreams. At times he can hear her working in the kitchen, the Witch. The clatter of pots and knives. Cauldron, cauldron boil and bubble. Hands floating in broth. Was that a dream or a premonition? He has seen this woman before—the Witch—in succubus nightmare. She is a pale skeleton covered with a fine downy fur.