A Cure for Suicide (8 page)

Emma chuckled to herself.

—They must know you very well, she said. Maybe when they see you enter the store, they put out items just for you.

—If it’s true, said Martin, I should pay them double. What a great place this is.

He winked at the claimant. When the claimant returned his gaze, he indicated the next room with his head.

The claimant looked around. No one else had seen.

—I’m going to get a start on these dishes, said Martin.

He stood up and started collecting the plates. When Hilda got up, too, he shook his head.

—You cook, I clean, I cook, you clean. You know the rules. Fair is fair.

—I’ll help you, said the claimant.

—Now that’s some help I’ll accept.

The two men went into the next room.

HE MOTIONED MARTIN OVER to the far side, and shut the door to the kitchen.

—Do you know how Hilda and me got here?

—No, you’ve never said.

—As I understand it, this village is actually part of the Process of Villages. Hard to believe, but true, as far as it goes. In any case, just to get in, you have to take some examinations and prove that you are a decent enough person not to disturb anything. I’ll tell you a secret.

The man leaned in.

—Hilda didn’t pass.

The claimant looked at him in shock.

—But…

—Yes, she didn’t pass. Apparently she lies, and she is given to, what did they call it, precipitous actions.

—What was the test like?

—It was a week-long monitoring. You stay at a house and they watch you and send people to speak to you. After a while, they learn enough about you to make a decision.

—Did you pass?

—Of course I passed! You know me now, can you imagine I wouldn’t have passed?

—I didn’t say that, I just. Maybe it is a hard test.

—Oh no, it is easy. The easiest thing in the world. You would pass in a minute. But Hilda, well, she is a very odd young woman. It was her idea, too, to come here. She wanted to live in one of these so-called settled villages. She said the shapes were calm and comfortable. I said, the shapes of what. She said, all the shapes, the way everything there is better. So, here we are.

—But,

the claimant mulled for a moment.

—But, if she failed.

—I paid the man a large sum of money to look the other way.

The claimant turned his face away. He could scarcely believe it. He wanted to go back to the house immediately, but he felt he would be seen through. And so they sat there, quiet, for perhaps fifteen minutes.

—These fine spring days, said Martin. I could live like this forever. And I suppose we will, eh, friend?

He clapped the claimant on the back.

—I was just thinking, if you didn’t take the test, you must have come here before they started the test. Is that so? You must have been around here quite a while. You must know this little village backward and forward.

—When did they start the test?

—I don’t know—but these sorts of things, they always come up as soon as I’m the next one in line. Wouldn’t surprise me at all if they started giving them the week before we came.

Martin put rubber gloves onto his hands and turned the faucet on, twisting the hot-water knob as far as it would go. The water poured out and steam rose to the ceiling. It was blisteringly hot, but Martin didn’t flinch at all. He took each plate and thrust it into the water, without any concern for the spray. The water flushed the dishes of any and all debris. When that had been done, Martin gripped them, one by one, and scoured them with a soapy rag. As he finished each, he would hand it to the claimant, to dry and put away. The first dish the claimant received was so hot he could scarcely hold it, but he did, and he dried it with a soft white cloth and set it in the bureau behind him. In the bureau there sat row after row of perfect white plates, perfect white dishes, perfect white bowls, cups, teacups. Things of every sort were there, and it was just as it had always been. Every time that the claimant had opened such a drawer, the inside had been just the same. He loved to look at these rows of clean dishes. Why, he could…

—Martin Rueger! Another dish for you. Don’t fail me now!

The claimant wondered what Martin would tell him. He wondered why he had been brought into the kitchen. But it soon became apparent that it was just for his company—for that alone. This was an interesting idea, and one that he did not entirely understand.

Or, it wasn’t that he didn’t understand it, he decided. It was that he distrusted it. The examiner always said, distrust things that are too easy. One wants the struggle—one shouldn’t permit it to be removed.

When they had finished the dishes, Martin showed the claimant a special knife that they had brought with them for cutting fish. It was very thin and the claimant found it a bit terrifying.

—This is a filet knife. I have used it to cut many fish. If you were to pile all the fish that I have used this knife on, they would fill this room and more. You literally could not fit them in this room, not even considering their slipperiness. Even imagining that they could be easily stacked, they still would not fit. If I were to begin cutting them into tidy portions for meals today, I would almost never be done. A week from now—after a week of cutting, I would have cut just the smallest portion.

—You see, he continued, I used to work in a fish market. My father was a fisherman, and all my uncles. But, they wanted something else for me.

The claimant went back into the dining room.

—I can’t bear to eat fish, Hilda was saying. I just, I think of them swimming around and looking forward to seeing the sunlight on the surface of the water, and then my heart goes out to them.

—Oh, that’s rubbish, said Martin, coming up behind the claimant.

The two men sat down.

—For one, said Martin, the fish don’t really care very much about the sunlight. I mean, you would, if we stuck you in the water, but they don’t. And the other thing is—you love fish! You eat it all the time—and you even ask for us to have it when we haven’t had it for a week or so.

—He’s completely right, said Hilda. I was just talking about not liking fish. A person can do that, right? Talk about something, about not liking something. That’s okay, isn’t it?

—A person can talk about anything, as far as I’m concerned, said the examiner. That’s the world we live in.

—Did you like the fish, Martin Rueger? Hilda asked the claimant.

—I liked it very much. This liquid that you poured…

—The lemon-butter sauce, yes, yes, it is my father’s recipe, said Hilda. Of course, he didn’t have to be a genius to think of it. It is just butter with lemon.

And in this way the conversation continued, both trivially and gravely, on into the night. When they retired, the claimant had so much to say about it all to the examiner that he couldn’t decide what to say, and they walked all the way home in silence and in silence went to bed.

THE NEXT DAY they were occupied in collecting, pressing, and drawing specimens of plants, and there was no opportunity to talk more. Soon, it was the nighttime. Soon, the bell had struck midnight, and soon the bell had struck one.

The claimant got quietly out of bed. He had not taken off his trousers or shirt, and so it was but a simple matter for him to slip out of the room and down the stairs. Through the half-open door, he could see the examiner in her study. She sat at a desk with her back to him, writing long into the night as she always did. The light from the fixture in that room was shabby. It fell very bitterly over the room, and some of the light from a lamp in the street contested with it. The effect was: as she sat at her desk she looked like a figure in a woodcut. And she was as still. If she noticed his going, she made no motion to mark it.

Down the stairs and out the door he went, and then he was standing in the street.

—MARTIN
!

Hilda was there. She was standing at the gate of a house, three doors down. He almost wouldn’t have recognized her.

—I look very different, don’t I? she asked. I can see it in your eyes. You thought that the person you were going to meet was just like Hilda, the Hilda you knew. And then here there is this other person standing on the street looking at you. She snuck out of her house at night to come and see you and you don’t know why. Now you don’t even know who this person is, but you can’t stop looking at her.

She stepped closer, right up to him.

—Come along, there is a good spot for us this way.

As they made their way down the street, the claimant had a terrible feeling—that at every window there was a face, and that every face was turned to him, and that they all knew him, they all knew why he was there, and what he wanted.

But even he did not know what he wanted.

THEY WERE IN A HOUSE that was being built. She had taken him to the edge of the town, and there, in the skeleton of a house, she took his hand and sat him down.

—I want you to prove to me, she said. I want you to prove to me that you are not an examiner, that you aren’t part of this Process of Villages! I am sure that something is amiss. They have been doing terrible things to me. I have tried to escape several times, but still they keep me here. First there was a different man, then there was a woman. Now I am forced to live with Martin. He is not my husband. I didn’t even meet him until last week!

She pulled him to her.

—Oh, I know you are not one of them. I know that Emma is your examiner. I can tell these things. I know that you will help me.

She told him that she had woken in a house like the one she lived in, that she had realized immediately she must pretend to be recuperating. She said she had done so, and had passed from one village to another. They move you in the night, she said, while you are sleeping. She said they didn’t think you could remember anything, at first, and so they were constantly changing their stories. She hardly slept once for a week straight, she lay in bed with her eyes closed, just in order to see what was happening, and she had discovered remarkable things. They come in the night—people come into the house. They put everything back. All through the house, they put things back the way they were. And someone goes into the study and unlocks the desk and takes things out.

—Do you know, she said, that they have a map, a sort of atlas, of your entire life, of the life that you lived before you came here? There is a place in the house where they keep it, and they consult it—they use it to plan the way in which they will control you. I know because it says so in the book. It mentions this atlas specifically. But no matter where I looked in the house, I couldn’t find it.

She began to cry.

—I have tried so hard to remember my previous life. I have stared and stared into walls, carpets, clouds, desperately trying to conjure up anything, but it will not come. They took it all away.

He ran his hand up and down her back. It felt very good. Her hair was very soft and he was touching it. She was talking and talking and the skin of her face was soft and smooth. Her eyes were greedy and bright and full of need. She looked into his eyes as he thought no one ever had, and then first slowly and then desperately, they moved into each other, convulsing and shuddering in joy. She could hardly bear to stop talking long enough to kiss him, but then she did. It was almost too much to have her touch him, but as soon as she had, he could bear nothing else. It was the same with her. He could feel in her that it was the same with her, that they were mirroring each other, that their feelings were springing back and forth. And she kept saying, over and over—be true to me. Be true to me.

—

The claimant sat on the porch with the examiner. She was telling him about the weather and how the weather worked. He asked why the seasons could be the same for so long. He said it was contrary to what she had told him about seasons. She laughed and said, we have moved villages four times. How close together do you believe those villages to be? And she had explained that in the first village where they had been, it was winter.

—The villages are all over. Thus, we can go to whatever season we like, and live the same life.

She was talking now about the clouds, and naming all the kinds of clouds.

Meanwhile, he remembered what Hilda had said to him when she left:

—Meet me, not tomorrow night, nor the next night—but three nights from now. Come to my house, Martin will be away. He will be away. Tell no one!

THE NEXT DAY, it was all he could do to behave the same as before. He felt when he saw the examiner that she would see right through him, and so when he had left Hilda, he had immediately made a plan. This was the first real action of his new life. Making a plan: he hadn’t done such a thing before. What did it mean to be able to do such a thing?

When he had gotten home in the night, he brought with him some new plants that he had found on the road. He sat up late drawing them and tried harder than he ever had before, and he managed a good drawing—the first good drawing he had done.

In the morning he showed this drawing to her.

She will think I am happy because I have succeeded. She will attribute all my happiness to this.

AGAIN AND AGAIN, he found himself imagining Hilda. He pictured her lithe brown body with no clothing. He imagined her thinking of him, and he felt concern. Could it not be that she might discover that he was not worth knowing? Could she not feel she was better alone? He grew terrified. He was a failure. He had little to say—and had done nothing, knew nothing. The examiner was constantly pointing out his faults and his stupidity. And when the examiner praised him, it was only out of kindness. What was there about him that could equal up to Hilda?

He looked back on the supper at her house, and he thought of the way she had been looking at him. Again and again, he replayed in his mind the episode in the kitchen. He could see her standing askance before him. How he wanted to see her again!

The examiner had stopped speaking. She was sitting silently, looking over at him, and there was nothing in her eyes at all. She was just a husk, just patience itself. She would inhabit her body again when there was a reason to. In the meantime, she waited in some nearby place. That was almost how it was with her.