Hostages to Fortune (28 page)

For he thought he saw, or dreamed he saw, in any case he saw, this stranger, this now definitely sinister stranger—who, however, seemed thoroughly at home—move closer, stand looking down at him where he lay. Still in shadow, his features could not quite be made out; nonetheless, he was familiar, and he was not Anthony. He was a lot like Anthony, but yet different enough not to be mistaken for him. It was somebody he knew, and this was disturbing because, strong as that sense was, he could not for the life of him place the fellow. Because he wanted not to? The man must know he was unwelcome. Welcome guests knocked before entering, were invited in. After playing hide-and-seek for weeks, this one had waited until today, taking advantage of his condition, his defenselessness, to come out into the open.

The man drew nearer, slowly bent down for a closer look, as though to ascertain whether he was awake, whether there was life in him. He said, “Don't I know you?” He had the feeling that he was being tested, taunted, though whether this was because he really did not know the man and ought to know him or because he knew him very well, perhaps better than he cared to, he was unsure. “I know you,” he said, though it was more in hope than in conviction, as a child might say it to someone masked and trying to frighten him. Then the face was thrust into his range of vision. But even after the features fell into place he could not identify the fellow—or could not believe what he was seeing. Then, yes, he knew him, all right. There, returning his stare of startled recognition and utter repudiation, was none other than himself.

It was as if the two of them had turned and fled in terror from each other, so suddenly did the apparition vanish and a rush of rational explanations, almost irrational in their rush, come to fill the vacuum left by its departure. Nothing otherworldly about this. It was a memory recurring to a drugged and semiconscious mind of that shocking sight of himself earlier in the mirror. It was a specter out of the mists of his depression. It was the drink. Mainly it was the drink, not just today's but the cumulative effect of all that had preceded today's. Fueled by alcohol, he had been headed toward a crackup. That way lay madness, his mind was now warning him. Then and there he swore off drink. The memory of the experience made keeping his pledge easy. He never even bothered to throw away his last, half-full bottle. In fact, the occasional sight of it was cautionary.

So when the same thing happened again a week later, with him thoroughly dried out and cold sober by then, there was no blaming it on the booze. The bottle that had gone untouched since he set it on the shelf had the innocent look of a reformed delinquent falsely suspected. But the apparition had appeared again, as though curiosity had impelled it to come see whether he had the effrontery to have gone on taking up living space.

After that reappearance it became a regular visitor, though making it plain always that the pleasure of his company was not the attraction. Or rather, not regular, for there was no predicting the time of its arrival, most irregular, but frequent. More and more so—too much to be called a visitor. It took up residence. It became his lodger, his boarder—his shadow.

No longer was it just a creature of the night and the twilight hours. It entered his room without knocking and made itself at home while he was trying to work. It sat across the luncheon table from him. It rode beside him in the car. Perhaps it was tonguetied with amazement. However, there was no need for speech. The expression on its face said all it had to say: with nothing to live for, why do you go on living?

This, he told himself, is a textbook case of what is called disintegration of the personality. If an echo could be heard before the sound that had produced it, this was such an instance, for just so would the psychiatrist later say it: disintegration of the personality. Both patient and physician were trusting that, thus identified, labeled a malefactor and a phantom of the mind, the malady would shun the light and seek the shadows, would slink away, go haunt somebody else. But delusions knew no shame. Their impudence was incorrigible.

A woman of his acquaintance once had a nervous breakdown. Even after the worst of it was over and she was again back in circulation one delusion of hers persisted. She was convinced that her teeth had turned black as a result of the tranquilizers she had been dosed with; nothing could disabuse her of this absurd and obviously painful self-deception. The poor soul's struggle with herself to be sensible, not to ask the question that tormented her, was evident, was painful to behold. She could actually be seen biting her unruly tongue. At last, unable to stand it any longer and, sick with self-disgust, personally far more exasperated with herself than her husband and her friends were with her, but in the grip of a drive beyond her power to resist, she would blurt “My teeth. What color are they?” One suppressed a groan and told her. Told a thousand times, she persisted in her folly. It was not just exasperating, it was maddening, the spectacle of a mind so impervious to sense. Delusions: all right, a person sick in her mind could not help herself; they were to be. expected. But this one was ridiculous. She had eyes in her head, didn't she—or did she?

So it was with him now. Reaching out to touch, which was to say
not
to touch and thereby dispel, his phantom, he touched only air, yet there it was. He might feel his body, pinch it, look into reflecting surfaces, but what his eyes relayed to his mind his mind did not receive, just as that poor disturbed woman, all the while praying “Dear God, please, I beg you, let my teeth be white. I know they are. I know it. Everyone tells me so. Please, God, let them be white to me,” with fear and trembling had looked and, between herself and her a veil of illusion intervening, had instead of white teeth seen black ones grinning hideously, mockingly at her. Looking over his shoulder as he looked at himself was another, implacably hostile, second self. This the mirror could not see, but there it was.

What he needed was a change of scene, some company; he needed to get out of here and be among people. But in his listlessness he made no move, and the thought of being among people, at first distasteful, grew more and more frightening. He feared seeing in their responses to him evidence that he had become peculiar, that he had lost his mind. He was unsure of even his most ordinary gesture now. Was it that of a sane man or was there something about it to which he himself was blind, and which betrayed a state of mental alienation?

With the death of love the love of death begins.

What would it be like not to be?

One who could ask himself that question had arrived, by whatever route, at a point where there could be only one answer.

That
au fond
reversal of natural order, of life's values, when a man took his archenemy, death, for his best friend, upset everything. Stand on your head and all the world was turned topsy-turvy. But just as an artist could learn certain things about his composition in no other way than by placing his picture upside-down on his easel, this odd angle of view could be uniquely illuminating. Though to be sure, the places into which the light was shone were places better left dark.

Thus was answered his old question about the suicide's choice of method, why one person chose to do it one way and another a different way. One did not choose, one was chosen, predestined. For this person a gas oven waited, for that one a razor blade and a warm bath, and of those two each would have said of the other's method “Oh,
I
would
never
do
that!”
Birds of a feather? No, birds of altogether different plumage. What did the means matter when a man might himself his quietus make with a bare bodkin? He might, but only if bodkins were his thing. One had a choice only when one had no choice, like the prisoner in his solitary cell with nothing but his bedsheet to make himself a hangman's rope. Seneca homilizes, “Wherever you look there is an end of evils. You see that yawning precipice? It leads to liberty. You see that flood, that river, that well? Liberty houses within them. You see that stunted, parched, and sorry tree? From each branch liberty hangs. Your neck, your throat, your heart are all so many ways to escape from slavery.… Do you inquire the road to freedom? You shall find it in every vein of your body.” A fine flourish of Roman rhetoric! Vanity to think one was free to pick and choose. Considerations operative throughout the life about to be willfully ended dictate the mode of death. The lifelong hydrophobiac will not drown himself nor the hater of firearms blow out his brains. Of these enemies of theirs they, who are their own enemies, remain afraid to the end. The swimmer will do it, the hunter will. The woman praised for the beauty of her neckline will not disfigure it in death by hanging herself. Only in that last line of Seneca's speaks the man who when his time came did not jump down a well or hang himself from the limb of a tree or even consider these alternatives but who used the dagger he had saved for the purpose. The means was provided before the intention was discovered, just as before the question “What have I got to live for?” was asked, the answer was ready and waiting. The answer had prompted the question. In his case he had been filling prescriptions for sleeping pills and hoarding them for weeks without questioning why, without letting himself observe what he was doing.

One effect of this reversal of things was shortly to make you feel that you no longer belonged to the human race. Its interests were not your interests, and because they were not yours and because yours were so much more serious and otherworldly, theirs seemed to you mundane, petty, frivolous, and vain. Time came to a stop for all men; the man who had stopped his own clock could look down upon others in condescension and pity.

He learned at least to doubt that suicide was ever truly impulsive, spontaneous, altogether rash. It gestated. In even the seemingly most impulsive cases the tendency toward it had been there, dormant, waiting for something to catalyze it, like that insidious killer, cancer, painless until past cure. Maybe not for long, maybe virulent and headlong almost from its inception, with the shortest of incubation periods, a galloping consumption of the soul, but there already, silently at work. He doubted that even the very young did it the first time they ever considered it.

Suicide was an addiction. It resembled alcoholism. In a mood of desperation one turned to the bottle. The contemplation of a painful but speedy and certain way to put an end to one's pain was like one's first drink of raw whiskey: one shuddered, gagged on it, nearly threw it up, but choked it down and it brought relief, anesthesia. Next time two drinks were needed to produce the desired effect. The habit grew, fed upon itself. Soon one was drinking in secret and on the sly and at unapproved hours of the day for drinking. Then came the time when, suddenly, it was you who were doing this to yourself. Not “one”—
you
. And realizing that the cure was killing you, you swore off, and the mere thought of that was enough to send you to the bottle ravening for a drink—a last drink—the first of many last drinks. So with the contemplation of suicide: you ended by becoming dependent upon it as your only way of keeping alive. You hugged it to you, afraid that it might be taken away, as the drunkard hugged his bottle, fearful that someone concerned for his health might take it from him.

Another thing he learned by standing on his head—learned it in advance of the lesson itself: the actual doing of the deed was made easier, was made possible by a reversal in which time was made to run backwards. The effects of things were their causes. He would have been dead for some time already when he got around to killing himself. That would be an anticlimax, almost incidental. To die then would be, if only for an instant, to live, to experience sensation after the long coma of emotional insentience.

Concentrate exclusively upon any one thing and the light shed upon that thing cast everything outside its circle in shadow. Now in the courtroom of his mind the advocate for death held center stage. He became a monologuist, a filibusterer, refusing to yield the floor. The objections by the voices that might have spoken in defense of life were drowned out. Discouraged from trying, they gave up.

The voice of reason and restraint is always muted and moderated, level. Should reason become passionate and loud in its defense it ceases to be reason. Yet of all things reason is the most impatient. It can tolerate no disagreement. It finds it opponent's claims too absurd to argue with and quits the field in disgust. One quiet and soon discouraged voice beset by the raucous mob which populates the mind of man: no wonder it is not much to be depended upon in times of most need.

One could generalize about suicide as one could about any human activity, so far and no further; each case was the work of an individual and thus unique; but now he was finding answers to at least some of the questions he had asked when he was trying to explain Anthony. (And many times he could see that death's head, so close in favor to his own, nod approvingly as he gained some new insight, as much as to say “Now you know. It was the only way you would ever understand: by following the path I cleared for you. To learn more, carry on. To learn all, go the distance.”) He had supposed that at some point Anthony's personality had split in two, like those unicellular organisms that multiply that way, and that the halves had then turned against each other in a fight to the death. Now he disbelieved that, for such was not the case with him. Instead of into two, he divided into at least three distinct parts: the two between whom the deadly contest was waged and a third who was their audience, a fascinated, terrified, and helpless audience of one such as he had been when as a small child at the Saturday movie matinee he had cried out to the unsuspecting hero on the screen to beware of the villain's designs upon him.

For in his drift toward danger he had not lost his fear, his instinct for survival; on the contrary, it had never been sharper. One part of him lived in constant, unremitting fear. But it was as though the other part were hypnotized. He could not get through to himself, break the spell, any more than he had been able as a child to make the actor on the screen hear and heed his warnings.