I won’t bother you, of course, but tell me quickly what you’re doing back here.
My adoptive brother died, I said, I’ve come to find out what happened.
Oh dear, she said. Was he ill?
Elena, that is the exact question I asked myself when I heard the news! I said to Uncle Geoff, Was he ill, no one told me he was ill! He wasn’t ill, he killed himself, and I’m trying to understand why. There are six possible reasons a person will commit suicide, would you like to know what they are?
I explained to her the six reasons. I told her there were of course more possibilities, including ones I couldn’t even begin to imagine. Suicide is everywhere, I went on, impossible to escape from. It must be an attractive solution to the irrational, the depressed, and the pathological.
What do you mean it’s everywhere? said Elena.
A few months ago a story circulated around my workplace about a coworker’s roommate, a young woman from China who had difficulty speaking English. When she got home one day, she did all of these mundane things, she unpacked the grocery bag, she took out the trash and recycling. She swept the floors. She left the mung beans, a package of glass-thread noodles, and one sweet potato on the counter. Then she went into the bathroom she shared with my coworker. She tied a noose and stepped off the toilet. She hung herself only a few steps away from my coworker’s bedroom. Of course she didn’t do a very good job, the noose came apart, and she fell down onto the tile, and on the way down, she slammed her head against the toilet. My coworker discovered her on the floor, the noose still partially around her neck, and took her to the hospital. Everyone, according to my coworker, shunned her after she survived her attempt, including my coworker. Who knows why everyone shunned her, except when someone attempts suicide and fails, we feel nothing but ashamed and embarrassed for them.
Better to have succeeded, I said to Elena, better to have died.
Maybe she tried to kill herself because her English was bad, and it was hard to make friends. Who could say? Or what about that French philosopher who threw himself out the window? Perhaps he saw swarms and machinic assemblages everywhere. Who wants to see that? And then there are the people who we always have on suicide alert, the depressed friend or cousin, the ones we always think are about to kill themselves, every time we get a phone call in the middle of the night, we think Dan or Vera finally did it, but we never get that phone call, and those people we thought throughout our entire lives were about to commit suicide end up dying happily of lung disease.
My point is, how is anyone supposed to live with anything? I said to Elena.
33
I went outside onto the patio, where it was cool in the shade and I could think, as I require a cool temperature in order to think, a cool temperature has always supported not hindered my thinking apparatus. I smoked a cigarette and threw away the box. I do not enjoy how slowly I think and take in information, I thought. How slowly I think and absorb information has always embarrassed me. After a minute or two, I looked up into the café through the glass doors. Elena was still seated at the table where I had sat, and it looked like she was crying.