Chapter 17 The Most Beautiful Thing I Had Seen in the Natural World #3
There were no social networks then, but the stories about me, some true and some wild fantasies, had spread fast. I could see it in the living room that night in my housemates at Capen.
Ethan had offered to bring me back to Amherst if I wanted to avoid the stares and glares of the other girls in the dorm, but I didn’t see how that could possibly help my reputation or make anything better.
The fact was, I saw nothing that could make things better.
Babies. Abortions. Wrecked families and rumors of young girls trying to take their own lives.
Older men in my past, too many to count.
And, of course, the death of Kenny Foster.
And the trials, one for manslaughter. Yes, in my mind now it was definitely plural: there would be a criminal trial and then a civil one.
I’d go to jail and bankrupt my parents. Or I’d go to jail and, when I got out, have my wages garnished for the rest of my life if I chose not to allow my parents to pay my portion of the civil settlement.
Tina was on the other side of Capen House now with her friends, Ethan—at my insistence—had left to take the bus back to Amherst, and so I sat alone on my bed and thought of my dog and my brother and my parents.
I was devastated that my friend Marie had told someone (perhaps multiple someones) about the NYU novelist in my past, but I also thought I should have known all along that she’d tell someone.
That was the way of the world: people talked about the horrible things that other people did.
Even the Puritans had used the word gossip as a noun for a certain kind of neighbor.
Marie was a good person and a good friend, but, at that age, how do you resist telling someone that you have a pal who’s a Venus flytrap for men with certain cravings and proclivities?
And I thought of Theo Catton’s kids and Kenny Foster’s sisters, four children younger than me whose lives I’d upended, even if I didn’t believe one had tried to take her own life.
Suddenly, once more, I was considering what my parents’ world would be like without me.
Clearly things hadn’t improved the year I’d been living in Manhattan, at least in part because there’d been no one around to water down their booze.
But hanging around the planet to replace their Johnnie Walker with tap water didn’t seem to me reason enough to keep breathing that night.
I hadn’t saved them and I couldn’t save them.
And they’d always have Spencer, their Pinnacle.
And my mother loved Harvey, and he loved her.
Even my dog didn’t need me. He’d moved on.
Which was when I made my decision. All the suicide notes, all those ruminations on the hows and whys and methodologies…
Theo’s kid had no serious plan and no real desire to end it.
But me?
I was deluding myself if I thought the manner in which I killed myself mattered.
It didn’t. Whether people thought my death was accidental or intentional—the latter fed by a deep well of depression, the underground springs of self-loathing and guilt—didn’t matter at all.
To arrive at suicide demanded a slow and steady progression, the misery and gloom leeching from an intellectual exploration in the mind into the heart of the soul.
Well, I had put in my time. Perhaps not ten thousand hours, but many hundreds: writing on subways, alone in my bedroom in Tallmadge, or at my aunt and uncle’s in Manhattan. In a law office conference room.
I was done, and I deserved nothing. It didn’t even matter to me anymore if people would believe I had cut off the target and then, ashamed or scared or both, tried concealing my crime in my golf bag.
I had a lot of weed in my nightstand. Atop Tina’s dresser was an X-Acto knife with a dagger-like blade that she used for art projects.
The second floor of Capen had a bathroom with an antique bathtub on claw-foot legs, the once-white porcelain now the color of an old mattress and even older bones.
I’d learned from my exploration of suicide that when you cut your wrists, you cut along the forearm, moving from your palm toward your elbow, rather than swiping a short stroke across the radius and ulna bones.
Run the razor blade in lines parallel to the bone, not perpendicular to it, so you’d bleed out before the blood could clot.
I smoked my last bowl and went to the bathroom, passing Tina along the way, to draw a bath.
I stripped and climbed in, savoring the warmth of the water.
For a long while I rested there, watching the steam rise.
But I had no plans to change my mind. I was ready.
Finally, I sat up, took a breath, and plunged the X-Acto first into my left wrist, drawing the blade at least seven or eight inches up my arm.
Then I did the same to my right wrist, though it was harder and more painful because I was right-handed and not as proficient at slicing through tissue with my left hand.
But I got the blood flowing there, too, watching—almost hypnotized—by the way the dark, incarnadine liquid diffused into the water like a flowering sea anemone.
It seemed to me then as beautiful as anything I’d ever seen in the natural world.
A lava lamp of human plasma and platelets, a slow-motion swirl of psychedelics and mammalian sap.
I was in my own waking fever dream, unsure whether there was an afterlife but caring not at all if there wasn’t.
My time at the pisky church, my confirmation classes with Father Whitlock, had left me with little that moment but the bitter, chalky taste of the communion wafers.
If life was a gift, it was a present I didn’t deserve.
The world, I was confident—and this was the only thing of which I was positive—was going to be better off without me.
It was almost sexual. Yes, I thought, yes, yes! I’m doing it, I’m really, really doing it!
Finally.
I’m killing myself.
Obviously, I failed.