(note)

Did someone say "short story?"

No?

Hmm.

I could have sworn I heard...

Never mind.

...

...

...

Well here's a short story. I've put it here in two parts before.

Here's the whole enchilada.



(note)

I was seven years old when I first realized I no longer had the will to live. It was then that I began a suicide note, as best a seven-year-old can, cataloguing the many injustices that had culminated in my desire to die. At that point in life I was absolutely certain that no afterlife awaited me, no angels, harps or eternal bliss; my interest in dying had far more to do with the earthy ramifications and impact upon those around me that my soul’s eventual status. It was an act of selflessness, the ultimate act, perhaps, but I was thoroughly invested in the notion that those around me should be made to mourn my dismissal.

I was raised on a lake in what many might call a vacation community. This is to say that most of my family’s neighbors would huddle at our sides during the summer months, fleeing to their homes, jobs and lives during the remaining seasons. For this, I hated them, hated summer, dreaded their arrival and exalted in their departure. When the heat came, our bucolic lakeside community grew swollen and bloated with rot; the fat-faced children and too-slim mothers, the sunburned scalps of the ample-bellied fathers, the drone of their recreational watercraft; our lake became carrion festering in the sun. It began every June. In late May of my seventh year, I knew that I would rather die that bear witness to another summer of searing, simmering disgust at the vacationer’s expense.

My suicide note was a work in progress that summer, not that I lacked the courage or resolve to do the deed- to kill myself- but instead because I steadfastly desired to take note of all the ugliness that surrounded me. I wanted my passing’s culpability to be cordoned out appropriately. Everyone who caused my death must feel it. They need to acknowledge the roles they played.

The summer went on and the note grew off one page and across two others. I hid it from my parents view, as I wanted the impact of my suicide to be white-hot, prescient and completely surprising. They were kind people, my parents, and raised me in a fashion most appropriate. That said they would not be spared.

The next year I still was alive, as I remained for two additional years. Until I was 10, in fact, I lived and breathed as in years previous. I played little league baseball, got good grades, made new friends at school and in my sparest of spare time, reworked and revised the suicide note I began three years previous. I recall marveling at how childish my scrawl appeared and how it catalyzed another round of sweeping aesthetic and semantic revisions. In addition, new injustices had befallen me. I dedicated new passages in the note to my baseball coach, the pederast (I was fairly sure, though no actual proof existed), my fifth-grade teacher Mrs. Langley whose myriad lies caused me to bite my lip in class until I tasted blood and a number of my classmates, those who derided me in the schoolyard or silently mocked me in their heads. They were now in the note and when I was gone, the thick patina of remorse would preserve them for the rest of their pathetic lives.

In high school (some years later) I received a new computer for Christmas. This was a watershed moment as far as my suicide note was concerned, as I always felt disgust when looked at my own sad-handed script, wishing it to be elegant and orderly. The effect of the note could not be compromised, especially in light of the eight years spent writing it. My junior year I eliminated extra-curricular activities like sports from my already-cluttered calendar, so I might be able to spend more time on my note. Incidentally, this was also the time I met Evelyn.

Evelyn and I were an instant pair; she, quiet and unassuming and I, opinionated and outgoing. We went everywhere together and were as much in love as any two sixteen-year-olds could be. When we were alone and all was quiet she would often profess her love for me, as I would her. Even in these naked moments of emotional openness, however, as we sat together unwrapped and ajar, all our wares on display, I would try to imagine her reaction when she heard I had committed suicide. I struggled with ways to spare her- to omit her from the precipitous wrongdoings I transliterated in my note- but knew well it was impossible. The world was cold and uncaring, and though she could not be blamed that it was the only world she knew, she would have to suffer its roiling ills like everyone else.

My father was transferred my senior year in high school and my family moved away from the lake to a planned community several states over. I was enraged and began my suicide note anew. I now had fresh kindling for my discontent and put it to good use. The school I knew was hundreds of miles away, as was Evelyn, and I assumed I would never meet another quite like her. For the first time, I shifted the internal significance of my suicide; I knew its impact would be devastating to my family and acquaintances, but I now sought a tactical means of killing myself that would create a stir in the community. I would never hurt anyone else, of course; I was to be the sole casualty of my event. I merely wanted to pull back society’s plaited mane, if just for a second, to show the contented masses the true ugliness of the world they had grown to tolerate. You see, I now knew that the concept of true pleasure was alien to mankind, and I wished to catalyze the inbred contempt of the lazy-minded. Once removed from a boil, one needs to shock cooked spinach with cold water to stop it cooking, lest it become mushy and devoid of any vitamins and nutritional worth. My flair for the dramatic could be that cold water, I thought, and my mind turned to planning.

I suppose it is worth noting that thanks to the computer I had received years previous, my suicide note was quite a well-ordered tome, sequenced by the temporal variable and cross-sequenced by the severity of the wrongdoing, the depth of the tragedy or the scope of the pigheaded stupidity. It was a gorgeous thing, and finally, as a twenty-year-old college student, I had devised a way to kill myself that equaled the elucidatory tome that’d accompany the act.

The city college I attended had a strong philanthropic bent, a moral wherewithal that was proudly worn on the sleeves of the student body and university in general. In the center of the campus, there was a monument to our esteemed altruistic pedigree- a 3500 lb. brass bell that would ring every time a donation was made to the humanitarian endowment. My plan involved positioning myself inside the bell’s vast skirt. The bronze tongue weighed several hundred pounds and upon a donation, lashed about the bell’s interior with (I hoped) skull-punishing verve. I would be killed by self-congratulatory charity, an irony that would not be lost on even the most brazen cretins. Soon my insular college environs seemed a bit too small, however, and I abandoned the plan to update my suicide note. My parochial dormitory life brought with it hosts of worthy new entries and annotations. I realized the note needed my full undivided attention, lest I forget a single person or episode. Skipping classes to service my note soon caused my academic scholarship to evaporate. Soon after, my stay at college seemed unnecessary as well. I was prepared to move back in with my parents and begin apprenticing at my Father’s workplace. Or so I said, as I had every intention of being dead before that phase of my life took root. It was then that tragedy struck.

My father won an annual sales contest (his third such victory- he was a talented salesman) and was awarded a seven-day vacation in British Columbia. The Cessna 421B plane that carried my mother, father and four others crashed en route from Vancouver to Whistler Mountain. All six died instantly. As the only child, it was my responsibility to fly to Vancouver and identify the cinders that were once my parents. As I stood in the coroner’s office, surrounded by sad-eyed local policemen, I felt nothing but the trenchant sting of loss. My usual emotional paucity evaporated. I shook a policeman’s hand off my shoulder and wept. My parents would not live to see me die.

A notable by-product of my tragic circumstance was an influx of both money and freedom. I could now live alone, pursue my every whim and do so without the burdens of employment. It was late April. I was 20 years old and wealthy. I knew that my death sentence was still very much in effect, but needed to be reconfigured now that the primary vessels of my plight were gone. I had always pictured my mother’s face, her mouth a rictus of shock and pain as she cradled the phone between her ear and shoulder. She has heard the horrible news. She’s cutting cucumber for a salad and nicks her finger. Still in shock, she listens to the voice on the other end as blood pools on the cutting board. That would never happen now, so I started trying to populate that frame with a new image.

There’s a syllogism among the under-loved, I discovered, when it comes to killing yourself: The fewer people who care for you, the fewer will care when you cease to exist. It was then that my mission revealed itself in a rush- I needed loved ones. Fast. I sought out Evelyn at her university. She had a boyfriend and looked upon our time together in high school as a lark; a playful bout of post-pubescent puppy-love. Her then roommate Mia, however, was available. She was perfect.

Our wedding was immense and immensely formal, at the bequest of Mia’s parents. She came from a large family of large people, all enormous-handed handshakes and suffocating hugs. They loved her very much, as they would their new son. I paid for the wedding, naturally, as my monetary reserves were still in place; I wanted to grant myself full, guilt-free permission to take note of every pathetic, precipitous detail. This was in service of my suicide, after all, and no expense would be spared.

Mia and I bought a home together All the while I waited for my newly-seeded emotional stores to amass. Though momentarily on hold, my expiration was as prescient as ever. It was time for patience, though. A dead married man with children is far more jarring than a dead married man. I deserved no less.

It was right before my son was born (our second child) that I considered enlisting a professional scribe to “ghost-write” my suicide note. Not that it wasn’t an eloquent, well-formed piece- it was- but I felt that perhaps the deft touch of a novelist could polish the less-prosaic portions and assure the maximum emotional gravity of the piece would be delivered in one laser-focused blow. I even entertained the notion of hiring a Writer to act as my biographer, then allowing my suicide (sudden as it would certainly be) to organically contour the piece into a living eulogy- a 3rd person suicide note in its own right. After much deliberation, I decided that I simply could not let another soul know of my plans, even one bound by professional acumen to keep our collaboration a secret.

Our eldest daughter and son were eight and six respectively when Mia left me. It bears mentioning that she did not leave alone, nor empty-pocketed, as she departed from my life with both children in tow and a third on the way. The third child, a girl, was not mine. She claimed that our decade together was the loneliest time of her life. She felt isolated, marooned, trapped. I never left my study, she complained. I was emotionally unavailable. Weeks would pass without so much as a word between us. I was unstable. A severe depressive. Dark. By the time she filed papers, it was too late for me to re-invest in her emotional attachment. I had allowed my initial deposits to stagnate, unchecked, until they evaporated. The next time would be different, I vowed.

So I won her back. We were “dating” each other again, a courtship that would last until our respective dying days. I was sure she loved me again. My son and daughter (and her youngest daughter; I did my best to deny her very existence) were a different matter altogether. To placate their craven want for normalcy, I took a job, or at least pretended to. I would vacate the house from 7:30 until 5:30 every weekday, spending the workday at the public library, or any number of local coffee shops, clattering away at my laptop and documenting every indifferent glance, every surly barista, every pre-occupied librarian, everything. I leased an office and employed a receptionist. I only saw the inside of my corporate headquarters twice. I had stationary, business cards and plausibility. It was worth the effort, as The Note was starting to meet my standards. It was starting to ripen, to hang heavy and low. The time to die was again near.

If I made one miscalculation in this time, it was allowing myself to assume the presence of love. To me, the love child possesses for father was a birthright on both counts; the child was hard-wired to give it, the father a worthy receptacle for the imperishable and illimitable affections he would surely receive. No, getting love is work. For this simple fact, my children seemed indifferent to me. They, like all children, were finely-tuned empathic instruments. They sensed no love in me, so they radiated little in return. In retrospect, if I were I to disappear, they would hardly notice.

As I aged and inevitable, “natural” death drew closer and closer, I never once hedged. I wavered not. I was resolute and single-minded. My plan, through its myriad versions and permutations, grew as I grew, but as I became older and more fragile, my plan, The Note, became an ironclad truism, a concrete totem of this irrefutably sadistic experiment, this life. I was now retired, relieved that the charade of dutiful industriousness had become mere memory. Mia seemed to age more quickly than I. The stairs in our large Victorian home had become too much for her. I resided on the third floor, a single longish room with a steeply pitched ceiling and a single circular window. She seemed fine with the arrangement. Once I was sure the ceiling beams could support my full, suspended weight, I was better than fine with the separation our forked capabilities enabled.

The children were long gone, well-schooled, married off and scattered about. I was not expected to stay in contact with them and I regarded them a lost cause. I grew tired in mind and body, even as my spirit sprinted towards the end, eyes ablaze with contempt. When Mia passed away suddenly, I was devastated. It was as if my heart had stopped in tandem with hers. All the years, the efforts and well-devised and executed affections- all were now for naught. She would not witness my self-inflicted death. My bravery and wisdom was never to be mourned by her. When I myself awoke one morning unable to pull myself out of bed, I should hardly have been surprised.

My illness was as absolute and steeled as I. It simply would not allow me the strength to kill myself. I tried, I suppose, or thought about trying, but futility awaited my every advance. Most of my schemes died between stations, in the synaptic gaps, before my nerves ever caught wind of the plan. I could still type, as I do this very moment, propping my laptop on a hospital tray. The Note is all here and it grows in metronomic increments, as it has for nearly seventy years. The puckish orderlies and their paltry designs are no match for me. The doctors condescend and plot my demise. My son and daughter visit daily, my son even talking about taking an extended leave from his law firm to tend to me. He’s receiving an entirely separate chapter and tabulation for his vaporous lies. My daughter brings me caramels from a local candy shop, assuring me that they are my “favorite” and have been since her youth. Each lingering chew serves to remind me how little she really knows me; how little she cares. What she doesn’t know is that I care even less. The Note will tell her. It will tell them all.

I have studied the ways in which an air bubble can be created in my intravenous feed. I can hardly wait for the opportunity to put that knowledge to practice. I know exactly what it will feel like. What I didn’t anticipate is my son visiting this late at night. Why could he be here? To watch me sleep? To shower me with his saccharin affections in hope that some staff member bears witness to his pantomime and validates the charade, makes it real, as if to assert that he really had a father, that he really was loved and loved back, that his life was not necessitated for the mere and simple fact that I wished him to suffer? As he lifts a hospital pillow to my face, I think briefly of trying to die smiling.

But that isn’t part of his plan.