Hostages to Fortune (29 page)

Also, he was drawn on partway out of curiosity. Personal and professional curiosity. He was beginning to gain some insight into a thing which had long intrigued him and which before he could only try to imagine: the workings of the criminal mind. It was disturbingly close to the workings of the fiction writer's mind, the kind he had always had: the shedding of his own personality and the projection of himself into an imagined character, the excitement of doing vicariously things one would never have done oneself, and he wondered whether his métier had prepared him for, even predisposed him toward this—and whether he had unknowingly manipulated the child of his flesh as he had done those who were the children of his imagination.

To another of his old questions the answer was yes, suicide gave depth to a person—or the illusion of depth. To split oneself into identical halves was to gain the third dimension of stereo. To say to an unsuspecting world, I have potentials in me that you people do not dream of. Would-be killer and victim in one, he was twice the intellect he had ever been before. His destination determined and his course fixed, he was free to observe and study himself. This he did with the fascination and surprised enlightenment with which he followed his fictional characters whenever—as always occurred with the successful, the convincing ones—they themselves took over their destinies from his direction and went their own self-willed ways. This was fiction brought to life, with himself as all the cast. He had lost interest in himself; now his interest was renewed. He had thought he knew himself; he was more complicated than he knew. His death gave him something to live for. He had never plotted a story as successfully as this one. Each day was a chapter. What would he do next? To be continued.

For as long as it lasted, this self-sustaining illusion that he was directing it gave to it a sense of make-believe and thus the comforting sense that his fear was synthetic, self-induced. Up to the end he would never quite fully believe that he was really going
all the way
. The preparations, yes; urged on by his helpful houseguest, up to the uttermost one, but then … Then something would intervene. The telephone, so long silent, would ring, a salesman would knock or some self-appointed door-to-door peddler of salvation, and the illusion would be shattered. The urgings of some cultist to mind his eternal soul would teach him how final a fate he had been flirting with. An airliner would pass overhead and he would look up and wonder where it was bound and that would remind him of places he had been to and make him sense once again how wide the world was, then wonder at himself, how he could have fallen so deeply into this deadly charade. Then to return to life would have the tonic shock of coming out of a matinee into the light of a day still to be fulfilled.

This lesson he would learn only after it was all over, but one self-protective mechanism was at work for him all the while—or was it not rather the most self-destructive, the most self-deceptive of all? In the case of suicide the consequence trammeled up the deed. Obscured, lost in the soft seductive promise of the end was the hard means required to attain that end. Never in all that semisomnambulant time did the unpleasant business toward which this was tending present itself to his mind's eye in all its grimness. Not one shred of pity or even of fellow feeling was he moved to by his occasional glimpses of his victim, his dead body, destroyed by his own hand. It was all preparation, a chase without an end in view, only a view of the sweet oblivion the other side of the end. So carefully planned, so long expected, the end would come as a surprise, almost an impertinence. Some unpleasant duty awaits my doing and only I can do it, a nasty chore to be gotten through and out of the way: of this he felt a dull, insistent but distant sense; however, the details of it were kept always out of mind.

Meanwhile the self-hatred required to do the deed was administered in small but ever-increasing doses like the homeopathic inoculations of the venom of some insect to which one was allergic in order to build up immunity. Death would be robbed of its sting. Now whenever his lifeless body did intrude upon his thoughts it inspired him with no feeling other than distaste. Its piteousness did not plead its cause but further condemned it. It could be thought of only as a thing. The owner of it himself had judged it worthless, a burden upon him and upon the world. Imperfect as the knowledge was, who better than the man himself knew a man's worth? How could anyone else feel for that inert and already decaying object anything but contempt and revulsion? Sweep it out of sight, put it out of memory.

But it would never come to that. And afterwards he would never speak of it to a soul. For it would have been all make-believe, playacting, bluff, of a certain immaturity, a childishness then if you will, of which, even at the time he was most deeply engrossed in it, he was perfectly well aware, and even acutely aware. And he was painfully embarrassed by it. To be quite truthful, in its antisociability, its secrecy and furtiveness, it had all the attributes of adolescent self-abuse. Blame it on bad company; he had been enticed into it by that uninvited lodger of his. Meanwhile, however, his very embarrassment was, perversely enough, an incitement to carrying on with it. It was mischievous, naughty, a prank played by two bad boys on the world. He was curious to see what came next. That was an encouraging sign, a healthy sign. As long as you were curious you were safe. It was when you stopped caring about what came next that you were in real danger.

And he could not have kept from taking the next step, foolish though he knew it to be, if he had tried. For it was not he doing it. Or rather, it was he and it was not he. It was some two-dimensional character projected upon a screen. Gone now was the rich sense of roundedness he had felt for a time. Now he could only watch. So sometimes did a crowd of people surrounding him like an audience in a darkened movie theater, watching him do such things. Such things as? Such as sorting and labeling things in parcels as though—As though what? As though to be found afterwards. He would be anxious, desperate to disassociate himself from that unreal character, to convince the crowd that what they were watching was him playing a role he had been cast in. Once the show was over and the lights went up he would step down from the screen and join them for a drink, a swim—whatever everybody was doing. And yet a feeling of ethereality, of other-worldliness, as though he were nothing more substantial than transparent celluloid, told him that he had ceased somehow to be like other people.

Meanwhile, knowing how the story came out did not lessen the suspense, the tension; still to be discovered was the timing. How would he know when his time had come? Anthony, availing himself of the temporary absence of his roommate Jeremy that his method required, had had it settled for him. How many times during those days had he rehearsed it: put the noose around his neck and tightened it and stood on his chair? The end of that absence nearing and Jeremy's return imminent, a voice had said to him “Now!” and he had kicked the chair from under him.

Perhaps his time would come when the playacting, the sham of it all, his shame for his procrastination, simply overwhelmed him with embarrassment and he would not be able to face another day of it. He would not need courage. The staginess of it all would sicken him and that would steel him to do the deed, and do it right.

He was learning much. Was that a part of the fascination of it? Much that otherwise he would never have known, could have learned in no other way. Maybe such knowledge was granted only to those who were not to be allowed to take it back with them from beyond. Others must learn it for themselves, as he had. Forbidden knowledge, revealed only to the daring, the unconventional, the dauntless, the self-exploratory few. One lesson was this: when a man became his own sworn mortal enemy a kind of inverted narcissism set in. By the world's standards worthless, untouchable, he became to himself a prize. When never before had he—that was to say, his continuation, his future—been of so little consequence to him, a matter of utter indifference, he found himself studying himself with as much respect as a pathologist nurturing in his laboratory a microbe he hopes to wipe out, as a hunter stalks his prey, a fisherman plots his strategy against a trophy fish. Priest and sacrificial victim in one, like those of the ancient Aztecs: the knife would be driven home and the throbbing heart cut out whole, but in the meantime the doomed one was the chosen one and was a living god.

Not that it would ever come to that. Not that he was going through with it. Not really. Once he had gone to that penultimate step and shown that he
meant business
then death would lose its allure, for that was based on fear and ignorance and he would have dispelled the mystery and proved his fearlessness. He could despise death then. It would be to gain a species of immortality, for no man could die twice. Only maybe by then he would have grown so weary of the game it would seem the only way to regain reality. Maybe when that point was reached, that absolutely last moment, and you were alone with the death you had courted as with your new bride, then it would lose its terror and between you and it the barrier would drop and there would be nothing to prevent you from stepping over the borderline to consummation. How to express the terror you were sure to feel on discovering that you had lost your capacity for terror?

As with the man resorting regularly to the bottle, who believes he can always quit and who discovers one day that he cannot, so with him: at some point the game ceased to be a game. Daily his fear of himself mounted. His took his alertness for inescapable vigilance. He despaired of outwitting an enemy so clever and so determined, one bent on his annihilation, who knew him so intimately and who foresaw and forestalled his every twist and dodge. When a man's mind was luring him to destruction it became devilishly ingenious.

Blinders had been put on him: he could see nothing to the side of the straight and narrow path he was on. Should he pause for a moment in his progress and try to get his bearings, he was prodded on by the watchful presence always at his back. It came to seem that he would be putting an end not to himself but to it, and that that would be the only way to do so.

One consideration deterred him: Tony. He hesitated to hurt him, but more than that, the thought had passed through his mind before, apropos of Christy and Anthony, that to someone close to the event, a suicide might set an example, point the way, and he feared setting an example to his friend suffering from the same loss as himself.

Then he made his last discovery, the one that triggered the timing. He found that he cared less about that than he should have. He found how selfish the would-be suicide was. Or if “selfish” was not quite the word for someone planning to destroy himself, then how incapable of consideration he was of those of whom he should have been considerate. His absorption in his own misery did not entirely numb him to the misery he was about to inflict upon them, but their voices fell on muffled ears. And in his case they hardly amounted to a chorus.

It was then that he heard Anthony say to him, “I'm waiting, Dad.”

Daunted by the prospect of the traffic on the State Thruway, he drove across the river thinking to take a less heavily traveled route. He was in flight.

The pills, some three dozen of them, along with the water to wash them down with, were waiting. He took one last, leavetaking look at the world. And that was his mistake. Given one more chance, life fought for itself. Never as in that instant had his vision been so sharp, his hearing so keen, the surge of his pulse so powerful. After weeks, months of subtlety of mind, the most involuntary, the most unintellectual of human urgings asserted its hunger. He could have wept, he could have laughed over this defeat of his will by an impulse so elemental. What he did was a bit of both as his body propelled him out of the house and across the footbridge to the old shed that housed his car.

He drove to Poughkeepsie so fast he was in danger of doing on the road the very thing he was fleeing from home to escape doing, and he was a menace to others as well. A change in his plans was called for. So in Poughkeepsie he stored his car and from there took a train to the city.

From Grand Central Station he went directly to the Princeton Club, and then directly back to the station. For at the club, on signing in, he was handed by the desk clerk the first of Pris's two letters.

To the clerk he said as he put the letter and the envelope in his pocket, “It seems I won't be staying after all.”

He had time to kill before the next train back to Poughkeepsie, so in Grand Central, onto the roof of which Christy had leaped those forty-seven stories to her death, he went out of old habit to the Oyster Bar, source of the scallops he always used to bring for the first evening of those cruises aboard
Pandora
.

“Are you alone, sir?” asked the headwaiter.

He absently replied yes. Then, “Yes. I am alone.” And, now a man the door to whose future had been flung open on a vista as flat and featureless as an arctic waste, he turned and walked away.

It must have reverberated in his mind a dozen times, like a clock bell tolling the hour of midnight, that worst of words:
alone
. Throughout the wait for his train, in the midst of the crowd, it tolled on. Throughout the ride upriver, throughout his conversation about the baseball season with the driver of the taxi he had decided to take home—tearing up and tossing out the window the claim check for his car as they crossed the Hudson—after he had paid his fare and tipped the man with the liberality of someone with no further need of money and heard him drive off, as he crossed the footbridge, mounted the steps, it tolled on. By then it had become a knell. It had attached itself as an echo to these lines supplied him by his fatal fund of verse:

When true hearts lie withered

And fond ones are flown,

Oh, who would inhabit

This bleak world alone?

PART THREE