Authors: Martin Amis
The body of a fifteen-month-old baby boy had been found in a picnic cooler in a public recreation facility in the Ninety-Nine, over to Oxville. A precinct canvass had brought investigators to a rowhouse on the 1200 block of McLellan. By the time I showed there was a cordoned crowd of maybe a thousand people lining the street, a gridlock of media trucks, and, up above, a Vietnam of geo-stationary network helicopters.
Inside, five detectives, two squad supervisors and the Dep Comm were wondering how to get this show downtown without a prime-time riot. Meanwhile they were questioning a twenty-eight-year-old female, LaDonna, and her boyfriend, DeLeon. A decade ago, a month ago, in recounting this, I would have said that she was a PR and he was a Jake. Which is true. But suffice it to say that they were people of color. Also present, sitting on kitchen chairs and swinging their white-socked feet, were two silent little girls of thirteen and fourteen, Sophie and Nancy—LaDonna's kid sisters. LaDonna also maintained that it was her baby and her Igloo.
It's kind of an average Oxville scenario: The family is enjoying a picnic (this is January), the toddler wanders off (wearing only a diaper), they start searching for him (in this open field), and are unsuccessful (and go home). Forgetting the Igloo. According to LaDonna, the explanation stares you in the face. The toddler eventually returned and climbed into the picnic cooler and pulled the lid down (engaging the external catch) and suffocated. Whereas the ME's initial finding, soon to be confirmed by autopsy, is that the child died of strangulation. According to DeLeon, things are a little more complicated. As they were leaving the recreational facility, their search abandoned, they saw a gang of white skinheads—known nazis and drug dealers—climb out of a truck and head for that part of the open field where the child was last seen.
We're all sitting there, listening to these two brain surgeons, but I'm watching the girls. I'm watching Sophie and Nancy. And the whole thing went transparent. This was all it took: From the adjoining bedroom came the sound of a baby's cry. A baby waking, dirty or hungry or lonely. LaDonna kept talking—she never skipped a beat—but Sophie rose an inch from her seat for a second, and Nancy's face suddenly swelled with hatred. Immediately I saw: LaDonna was not the mother of the murdered boy. She was his grandmother.
Sophie and Nancy were not LaDonna's kid sisters. They were her daughters.
Sophie was the mother of the waking baby in the bedroom. Nancy was the mother of the baby in the Igloo.
Sophie was the murderess.
It was down. We even got a motive: Earlier the same day, Nancy had taken Sophie's last diaper.
I was on the six o'clock news that night, nationwide.
'This murder was not about race,' I reassured 150 million viewers. 'This murder was not about drugs.' Everyone can relax. 'This murder was about a diaper.'
There are three things I didn't tell Trader Faulkner.
I didn't tell Trader that, in my view, Jennifer's letter was not the work of a woman under terminal stress. I've seen a hundred suicide notes. They have things in common. They express insecurity—and they are barren, arid. 'Serzone, depecote, tegretol—they sound like moral stances.' Toward the finish of the lives of suicides, more or less all their thoughts are self-lacerating. Whether they soothe or snarl, cringe or strut, suicide notes do not seek to entertain.
I didn't tell Trader that with an affective, or emotional, disorder the sexual drive sharply declines. Nor did I add that with an ideational, or organic, disorder it almost invariably disappears. Unless the mania is itself sexual. Which gets noticed.
I didn't tell Trader about Arn Debs. Not just because I didn't have the heart. But because I never believed in Am Debs. I didn't believe in Arn Debs for a single second. Time 1:45.
Random thoughts: Homicide can't change—and I don't mean the department. It can evolve. It can't change. There's nowhere for homicide to go.
But what if suicide could change?
Murder can evolve in the direction of increasing disparity—new 'dis' murders.
Upward disparity: Sometime in the Fifties a man made a homicidal breakthrough. He planted and detonated a bomb on a commercial airliner: To kill his wife.
A man could bring down—perhaps has brought down—a 747: To kill his wife.
The terrorist razes a city with a suitcase H-bomb: To kill his wife.
The President entrains central thermonuclear war: To kill his wife.
Downward disparity: Every cop in America is familiar with the super-savagery of Christmas Day domestics. On Christmas Day, everyone's home at the same time. And it's a disaster... We call them 'star or fairy?' murders: People get to arguing about what goes on top of the tree. Here's another regular: Fatal stabbings over how you carve the bird.
A murder about a diaper.
Imagine: A murder about a safety-pin.
A murder about a molecule of rancid milk.
But people have already murdered for less than that. Downward disparity has already been plumbed—been sonared and scoured. People have already murdered for nothing. They take the trouble to cross the street to murder for nothing.
Then there's copycat, where the guy's copying the TV or some other guy, or copying some other guy who's copying the TV. I believe that copycat is as old as Homer, older, older than the first story daubed in shit on the wall of the cave. It precedes the fireside yarn. It precedes fire.
You get copycat with suicide too. Fuck yes. They call it the Werther Effect. Named after a melancholy novel, later suppressed after it burned a trail of youth suicides through eighteenth-century Europe. I see the same thing here on the street: Some asshole of a bass guitarist chokes on his own ralph (or fries on his own amplifier)—and suddenly suicide is all over town.
There's a recurring anxiety, with every generation, that a 'shoah' of suicides has come, to blow the young away. It seems like everybody's doing it. And then it settles down again. Copycat is more precipitant than cause. It just gives shape to something that was going to happen anyway.
Suicide hasn't changed. But what if it 'did' change? Homicide has dispensed with the why. You have gratuitous homicide. But you don't—
-+=*=+-
It's 2:30 and the phone is ringing. I suppose that for a regular person this would mean drama, or even catastrophe. But I picked it up as if it was ringing in the p.m.
'What?'
'Mike. Are you still up? I got another one for you.'
'Yes, Trader, I'm still up. Are we going to do 'distressed' now?'
'Consider this a preamble to 'distressed.' I got one for you. Are you ready?'
His voice wasn't slurred—it was slowed: Idling at around 33 rpm.
'Wait a second. I'm ready.'
There's a widowed mailman who has worked all his life in a small town. A small town with extreme weather conditions. Retirement is nearing. One night he sits up late. Composing an emotional farewell to the community. Stuff like: 'I have served you in ice and in rain, in the thunder and the sunshine, under lightning, under rainbows...' He has it printed up. And on his last but one day he drops a copy into every mailbox on his run.
The next morning is bleak and cold. But the response to his letter is warm enough. He has a cup of coffee here, a slice of hot pie there. He waves away the modest cash gifts he's offered. He shakes hands, he moves on. A little disappointed, maybe, that no one seems to have been stirred by the—by the quality of his dedication. By its poetry, Mike.
Last stop on his round is the house of a retired Hollywood lawyer and his nineteen-year-old wife. She's a retired hatcheck girl. Gorgeous. Full-figured. Wide-eyed. He rings the bell and she answers. 'You're the man who wrote the letter. About the thunder and the sunshine? Come in, sir, please.'
In the dining room there's a table groaning with exotic food and wine. She says her husband has just left for Florida on a golfing trip. Would he care to stay for lunch? After coffee and liqueurs she leads him by the hand to the white fur rug in front of the glowing fire. They make love for three hours. In the amber light, Mike. He can't believe the intensity of it. The strength of it. Was it that very poetry that had so moved the young woman? Was it the rainbows? He thinks that, at the very least, she's his for life.
He gets dressed in a daze. Wearing a flimsy housecoat, she leads him to the front door. Then she reaches for her purse on the hall table. She offers him a five-dollar bill.
And he says, 'What's this for? I'm sorry, I don't understand.'
And she says, 'Yesterday morning, over breakfast, I read your letter out loud to my husband? About the ice and the rain and the lightning? I said, 'What the hell am I supposed to do about this guy?' He said, 'Fuck him, give him five bucks.' And lunch was my idea.'
I managed a kind of laugh.
'You don't get it.'
'No, I get it. She did love you, Trader. I'm sure of that.'
'Yeah, but not enough to stick around. Okay. Let's do 'distressed.' I apologize in advance. It'll be no damn use to you.'
'Let's do it anyway.'
'We spent Sunday nights apart. So it always seemed like a good idea to go to bed together late Sunday afternoon. That's what we always did. And that's what we did on March fourth. I'd like to say, I'd really like to say it felt different, that Sunday. Like during the act of love she 'went away,' or 'disappeared.' Or some such. We could cook something up, couldn't we? Have her say something like, 'Don't make me pregnant.' But no. It was exactly like it always was. I drank a beer. I said goodbye. So why was I 'distressed'?'
By now his voice was sounding like my tape recorder when the battery's about to fritz. I lit a cigarette and waited.
'Okay. On my way down the stairs, I tripped on my shoelace. I knelt to retie it, and it snapped. I also caught a hangnail in my sock. On my way out the side door I ripped my coat pocket on the handle. That's it.
So when I hit the street I was naturally very 'distressed.' Mike, I was suicidal.'
I wanted to say: I'll come over.
'Fuck him, give him five bucks.' I thought that was pretty funny the first time around. Now it makes me scream with laughter.'
I wanted to say: I'm coming over.
'Oh, Christ. I just didn't get it, Mike.'
That list headed Stressors and Precipitants—there's not much left of it now. To keep myself quietly amused, I think about compiling another list, one that would go something like:
Astrophysics
Asset Forfeiture
Trader
Tobe
Colonel Tom
Pop
Beautiful
But where's the point in that? 'Zugts afen mir', right? We should all be so lucky. And even though we aren't, we're still here.
Stressors and Precipitants. What remains? We have: 7. Other 'Significant Other?' And we have: 5. 'Mental Health? Nature of disorder: a) psychological? b) ideational? organic? c) metaphysical?'
Now I cross out 7. I cross out Arn Debs.
Now I cross out 5 a). After some thought I cross out 5 c). And then my head gives a sudden nod and I cross out 5 b). That, too, I excise.
Now there's nothing.
It's 3:25 before it hits me. Yesterday was Sunday. The night train must have been through hours ago. Hours ago, the night train came and went.
On the evening Jennifer Rockwell died, the sky was clear and the visibility excellent.
But the seeing—the seeing, the seeing—was no good at all.
Part Three
T H E S E E I N G
This is where I felt it first: In the armpits. On March fourth Jennifer Rockwell fell burning out of a clear blue sky. And that's where I first felt the flames. In my armpits.
I woke late. And alone—though not quite. Tobe was long gone. But somebody else was just leaving.
The morning after she died Jennifer was in my room. Standing at the foot of the bed till I opened my eyes. Then of course she disappeared. She returned the next day: Fainter. And again, and always fainter. But this morning she was back with all her original power. Is that why the parents of dead children spend half the rest of their lives in darkened rooms? Are they hoping the ghosts will return with all their original power?
She wasn't just standing there, this time. She was pacing, for hours, pacing swiftly, bent, lurching. I felt that Jennifer's ghost was trying to throw up.
Trader was right: 'Making Sense of Suicide' doesn't make sense of anything much, including suicide. But yet it told me what I needed to know. Its author didn't tell me. Jennifer told me.
In the margins of her copy of the book, Jennifer had made certain marks—queries, exclamation points, and vertical lines, some straight, some squiggly. She had marked passages of genuine interest, such as might have struck anyone who was new to the field: Like the bigger the city, the higher the rate. Other passages, I can only think, were just being heckled for their banality. Examples: 'Many people sadly kill themselves around exam time.'
'When encountering a depressed person, say something like, 'You seem a bit low,' or, 'Things not going well?'
'In bereavement, make yourself better, not bitter.' Yeah, right. Do do that.
It was way after Trader called and I was still sitting up, brain-dead from reading stuff like that—about how unfortunate suicide is, for all concerned. Then I saw the following, marked with a double query by Jennifer's hand. And I felt ignition, like somebody struck a match. I felt it in my armpits.
As part of the pattern, virtually all known studies reveal that the suicidal person will give warnings and clues as to his, or her, suicidal intentions.