He knows already what will happen.
He knows because it has happened before, many times before. He knows because it always happens. Each time he and a woman decide to kill themselves, he lives on, in mockery and defiance of his own will to die, in mockery and defiance of the promise he has made to join her – whoever she is – in death.
Yet he will do it. He will, with her, his new one, dutifully by his side, consult his suicide manual. He will enjoy her conversation and admire her eyes as they scan the words, the morbid and profane and, to her, impenetrable words, that will, in the end, lead her and her alone to her end. He will translate for her, for she is impressed with his Japanese language skill, and fortunately for him, his suicide manual has yet to be translated into English. He once considered translating it, but translations don’t count toward tenure – so it would have been a waste of his time. He enjoys being the intermediary, besides, the conduit between the ideographs on the page and the woman who is keen on learning their meanings, hidden secrets.
He pours her a brandy and offers her the manual. She accepts both, though she does not immediately put the glass to her lips. Instead, she sets her glass on his iron kitchen table and caresses the book’s dust jacket. Silver with a drawing of a man in a coffin directly in its center, it is an alluring object. She is hesitant to open the manual, he observes, but she will not change her mind about their postmortem pact. He is confident.
Love suicide was her idea, after all.
He never suggests it, that is his first rule. He has several rules, but that is his most important rule, the one he will never break.
“K, I love you,” she said one night against the glow of candlelight, snatching up his hand in her own and pressing his fingertips to her lips. “And I cannot imagine a life without you.” He took her words for so much dramatics at first, but she did not relent. She spoke at length of her affections for him and of refusing anything less than his undying love. Those were her words – “undying love.” He knew she would suggest that the only true undying love is a love cultivated in and by death. It’s a trite thing to say, utterly ridiculous, but charming and romantic as well. Naive. He knows that that is not true, at least not for him, for he knows only the disgrace and shame of living with a love that dies with the woman that he loves.
And he does love – passionately and recklessly. He does not hope for disgrace and shame. He hopes for death and sweet escape. But he knows now that he is cursed to love women who yearn to die with him, and who do die, as intended – a math problem left half solved, a loaf of bread only partially eaten.
So she will die, this beauty seated next to him, this creature who will be alone in death as he will be alone in life, until a new woman comes along. And a new one always does.
She is nervous, he can tell, and her languid fingers continue to trace the book’s edges. There is no small talk to be made now. No pointless conversations about unimportant things. She tastes the brandy and inhales, opens the book. Flipping through the pages, she examines the odd diagrams of stick figures swallowing pills, tying nooses, and slitting wrists. He has long puzzled over the affinity the Japanese hold for graphs, charts, and drawing. He cannot explain it, but he may not have to, for she finds the crude visuals beneficial, a kind of suicide shorthand.
“What does this say,” she asks, stopping randomly at Chapter Six.
“Gas Poisoning,” he replies gently. She takes a moment to compose herself, so he elaborates. “Carbon monoxide. Things like that.”
She flips to the next chapter. “And this?”
He leans closer to her, allowing his brow to brush against a strand of her dangling hair.
“Electrocution. That’s probably self-explanatory.” He allows himself to smirk.
“I admit, I thought you were joking when you told me you had a suicide manual.”
“I know.” He places his hand on hers. “There’s a table of contents at the front,” he continues, allowing her to make the same mistake all of the other women have made. “That’s the back,” he reprimands laughingly, once she realizes her error. “Japanese books open the other way.”
She blushes: “Sorry.”
She observes the morbid list and he translates mechanically and too literally, his bad habit.
“Chapter 1: Overdosing.
Chapter 2: Hanging.
Chapter 3: Self-Destruction.
Chapter 4: Slashing the Wrist.
Chapter 5: Car Collision.” He pauses now, and looks into her eyes. “You know what Chapters 6 and 7 cover,” he says as though he is back in the classroom testing his irritating college students. Then he continues:
“Chapter 8: Drowning.
Chapter 9: Self-immolation.
Chapter 10: Freezing.
Chapter 11: Miscellaneous.”
“‘Miscellaneous,’” she questions, mischievously.
He shrugs: “The Japanese,” is all he says in response. A self-evident response.
“‘Self-Destruction,’” she says with the same inflection.
He shrugs again. “That’s what it says.”
He wonders which method she will choose, for he always lets them choose. Overdosing has been the most popular method by far, followed inexplicably by freezing. Only one woman chose to die in an automobile accident. K gripped her hand as they went through the windshield of her white BMW. She died instantly while he spent a week in the hospital. Only one woman chose to hang, too. She was wispy, fragile, and her poor neck snapped instantly. K dangled helplessly until his noose came unraveled, sending him crashing to the floor. He dragged her body into a field after that, because he would never allow himself to be incarcerated for a crime of passion, if one could call it a crime at all.
He observes her observing the table of contents. He tries not to anticipate her choice, for he does not want to be disappointed. He has already decided that she is different from the others, perhaps special but perhaps not; should she choose to overdose she will be very much like the others, regardless. He has a number of pills ready; indeed he has everything ready, so that he is ready, no matter which choice she makes. This is why she has come over tonight, so they can make their plans. He will not ask her to die tonight, but he is ready if she wants to.
She takes her brandy thoughtfully, with class. She wets her lips, sets the glass back down. She rubs her tongue along her lower lip, which arouses him. He follows her tongue to her mouth, imagining himself slipping inside her mouth, sliding gently down the back of her throat like cocaine, residing within her for all time. That would be the best kind of death – erotic, consuming.
Overrun with passion, he grips the nape of her neck and kisses her. She kisses him back, running her hand upwards through his hair as she does so. Death makes everything passionate, he learned long ago. This is what she is learning now.
She pulls away. His face is still close. “Drowning,” she whispers, shoveling her words into his mouth with another kiss. It is his turn to kiss her back, and he obliges. She is indeed different, for none before have chosen to drown. Drowning seems awful, tedious, horrendous. It is a terrible way to die, perhaps bested only by self-immolation. Drowning is not subtle, but neither is her kiss. Drowning is deliberate, purposeful, bold – so is she. It is the best way for her to die. He does not wonder if he will actually die this time, for he has given up wondering. It is now a given that he will have to dispose of her drowned, bloated body.
“As you wish,” he whispers, kissing her again. His eyes are open, clouded with sadness.
‘“Tonight,” she huffs with passion.
“As you wish,” he huffs with equal passion. He kisses her extra hard now, extra deep, because after tonight there will be no more kissing her.
He places his other hand around the other side of her neck. He stands, craning and stretching her neck, making their kiss more dramatic. Her hands grip his belt. She yanks his body close, folding her arms around his torso and then running her fingers up his shirt.
She digs her nails in, pulls downward; he arches his back in response and lets out a noise, an animalistic noise that says that right now he wants her and is thinking only of the present. He pulls her by her throat to her feet. They kiss again. He kisses her jawline now, first to the left, then around to the right. He squeezes her tightly and she exhales roughly – the erotic song and dance fulfilling itself. They are both practiced in the ritual. It bores him, and he opens his eyes, noticing that hers are closed. She is enmeshed in the moment; he is not, having become tired of the whole charade, over time. But he cannot resist. He is a lover, besides.
The first time a woman suggested love suicide he was caught off guard. Ever the shy boy, he never thought a woman would want to make him her final lover and confidante. It was only by happenstance that he had acquired his suicide manual and, nearly in jest, suggested she come over to, in his words, “consider their options.” He offered her the book, the manual, he happened to order only a few days prior because of his research interests in Japanese youth culture. The suicide manual was the product of generational anxieties, at a time when young people were killing themselves with reckless abandon. Whoever wrote it no doubt grew tired of trains being delayed by “human accidents,” as they were politely called in the press. She, his first, chose to die by pharmaceuticals, and he, yet inexperienced, figured it was just ill fortune that caused him to wake the next morning to find her cold, cold body resting silently. Now he thinks differently.
He wads her black hair up in his fist, pulls hard, sends her chin to the sky. He kisses her neck again, pulls again on her hair. He spins her around now, her backside settling into his crotch, his hands settling into her pants. They make love, profess love, touch each other’s skin, trace each other’s veins, feel each other’s life. These moments, these intimate moments he has grown to despise.
He misses her, his first, his first loss, his first vacancy, his first disgrace.
He has loved many other women since, but she, this phantom bride, remains wedded to his heart, has hooks in his heart that he cannot dislodge no matter how many women’s bodies he devours. He misses her so much, and torments himself by dwelling on what happened and what could have been. She was modest in the bedroom, even timid. He stroked her face with a tenderness he has not been able to replicate, and she, with muddy brown eyes, gazed at him with an intensity that has infected his being. Her body was hard and tan, tattooed with incomplete tattoos. She was proud of her body but did not like being looked at by men, had probably been looked at too much by men. Her body, her entire physical presence, was a paean to vanity and ego – sculpted and manicured to perfection. He admires the vain and the egotistical, for his own overwhelming sense of self has only ever been overshadowed once, by hers. When he found her head, he fretted and thrashed, worried over what would become of her beautiful body. He imagined it in a morgue somewhere, pale and blue, rotting, being enjoyed by nobody. He found solace in the fact that beyond beauty can only lie destruction: the imperfect strive for perfection; the perfect preserve their perfection in death. Since her death, he has come to appreciate her perfection and is even taunted by it, and each woman who prostrates herself under him, beside him, reaffirms loss and want, is another echo into a hollow cavity. He is not naive enough to think that his enduring commitment to love suicide is anything more or anything less than what it is. To pursue her in the afterlife would go against the logic of love suicide – he would not do that: that is his second rule. He appreciates each woman, loves her, then commits to die with her and only her. She deserves that much, at least.
“K,” she whispers afterward, nestled into his side, “I’m ready.” He runs his fingers through her hair, silently. She is bold, this one – this “victim,” to call a spade a spade. He kisses her gently on the forehead. He does not want victims. As a young adult he wanted to be the victim, prey for a beautiful woman. In graduate school, he became interested in the femme fatale archetype, the beautiful but ultimately lethal woman of myth and lore. Although he had met plenty of women who in one way or another made his life miserable, he wanted a kind of physical – rather than emotional – destruction, and he wanted to enjoy it; like the men in his books. He thought often of Wanda, the victimizer in Venus in Furs, who demands of her poor
whipping boy: “Be then my slave, and know what it means to be delivered into the hands of a woman.” K found instead, in his more suitable mates, a kind of symbiotic slavery, a mutual attraction to the limit. He found, in these mates, an eagerness to cross the threshold, hand in hand, into oblivion – a thirst for eternal and mutual servitude.
He is ill-prepared. He does not know how to achieve tonight’s goals, for he simple doesn’t have the resources to drown two people. Suffocation, drugs, poison, hanging – these would have been relatively easy tasks to carry out. But drowning? One person could successfully drown in his bathtub, but not two. The whole point is to die simultaneously, in unity. Otherwise it is yet another sad, lonely death. The whole point is to die in comfort, familiarity, and love. He does not, after sex, want to drag her into the forest and push her into a lake and then jump in after. Her lithe body, tangled in his bedding, is too precious.
“Soon my love,” he offers into the air, kissing her again. “Give me just a moment more.”
“Are you reconsidering?” Her voice is soft, but words sharp. He is caught off guard – no one before has ever spoken to him like that. She rubs her fingernails up and down his torso.
“Of course not my love. Just a few more moments with you in life before we are together in death.” The words strike him as genuine, if slightly trite and rehearsed.
“Have you ever done this before?” She continues to scrape her fingernails along his skin. “I mean,” – she catches the oddity of her question, – “of course you haven’t. Because you’re here with me. I mean, have you ever promised to die with a woman?”
His impulse is to lie, to preserve the fantasy-fallacy. How will she react should he confess his burden, his curse? Will she abandon him? Will she even believe him? Ever a man of morals, he inhales and waits before speaking. “I have.”
She does not react, which is good for him or bad for him.
He continues, slowly, deliberately: “I have done this many times. With many women, women I have loved deeply, as I love you deeply. I have scars, which I have kept hidden from you. Some are deep and some are shallow, but they are a record of my flirtations with death and futile attempts to join the women I have loved. They always go – go wherever the dead go. I, obviously, always stay behind. I hope that, with the right woman, my time will come.”
“May I see this record? I’d love to read it.”
“No.” He is curt.
“Am I the right woman?” She has asked the right question.
“That is why we are here.” He is evasive, and he has lied, for she is not the right woman. The right woman came and went already. The right woman is long dead, an afterthought he cannot escape. His inability to die is simply a reminder of the ease with which she left him behind, traitorously.
“You flatter me,” she says smoothly, almost with calculation.
“Yes my love.” He kisses her on the head.
They lie in silence, his bedroom is tomblike, a precursor, perhaps, of what is to come. He does not believe what he has told her, about dying when the woman is the right woman, but he likes the idea. He strokes her hair and she strokes his skin. He presses his body against hers and she shifts gently in response. Then stillness.
“How would you die,” she asks. “You wanted to know how I would die. But how would you die?”
No one has ever asked him that question. The woman always decides the method – that is his third rule. He is honored by her compassion, if that’s what it is. Perhaps it is just curiosity, but he doesn’t think so. He knows exactly how he would die, given the choice. But she means how would he die with her. Selfishly, he has not considered how he would die with a woman. The logic of his third rule allows him to never have to consider it.
His desire to be consumed by a woman precludes her own participation in joining him in death. So he tries not to think about it. Nevertheless, he begins cautiously:
“I want us to —,”
She cuts him off, raises her head, looks at him. “That’s not what I mean. If you could die, regardless of circumstance, how would you die?”
He wastes no time in telling her of his hidden fantasy, in rich detail. He tells her of the joys of complete subjection, for to him it is to be completely subjected. To nourish a woman’s body with his own, to become part of her, and to vanish into solitude inside her. He would not go out of his way to die with a woman, to be chained to her for eternity. He would accompany her, of course, but he has no desire for the inverse.
She listens intently, nods in deep understanding at the appropriate moments. She lengthens herself, kisses him on the lips, stares at him. She kisses him again, puts her hand on his crotch. “Close your eyes,” she says in a faux whisper.
He obliges, expecting something sexual. She is erotic and sensual in a way the other women haven’t been. He feels a subtle twinge in his heart, the bashfulness of his first coming back to him. He longs for her. But only momentarily. His thoughts are disrupted by a grotesque noise, a noise so unsettling he doesn’t dare open his eyes. There is a dripping sound, a slithering sound, a breaking sound. He doesn’t feel her against him anymore. His skin bristles against its solitude. Again a noise, a terrible noise. She is the orchestrator, the conductor of this obscene symphony. He does not move, feels something wet hit his skin, like fat raindrops. He flinches, grimaces, eyes closed hard.
He recognizes the moment that she swallows him. He becomes warm all over, like settling into a bath. He is enveloped completely, and as she swallows him, he is jostled violently, turned upside down, pressed upon by the insides of her throat. He feels her pathos as he is delivered to her deep, dark insides. Complete darkness comes and he is at peace.
“K?”
A familiar voice. It’s his first: his first death, his first love. She is as he remembers: wan, intense, distressed. Her brow is furrowed, as it was back then. She doesn’t want to be here, that he can tell. He grabs her forearms, looks her in the eye, intensely in the eye. She used to wear bangs, but now her hair is different. It sweeps down at a pretty angle, leaving her forehead exposed in a cute way. He stares, stunned.
“I preferred you with bangs,” he says finally, attempting to break the silence that is closing in around them.
She brushes her hair with her left hand, removing herself from his grip.
“I’ve missed you,” he continues, reaching for her arms but she pulls away.
“Fuck you,” she hisses.
This is not how their conversation is supposed to go. She is supposed to speak of her terrible loneliness without him. She is supposed to pledge her love that could finally be called undying – for both of them are now dead. They can now be together. Is this not what she wants anymore? It is what he wants. Can she not see that?
“Why did you bring me here,” she demands, misunderstanding the situation.
He sighs. “I did not bring you here. You’ve been here all along waiting for me, don’t you see? I’m sorry I’ve been apart from you for so long. But you must understand, I am cursed. I was unaware of my curse back then, when we tried to be together in death, but I am all too familiar with it now. My curse was to die alone. And alone I have finally died. But inexplicably here I have found you. Are you not happy to see me? Did you not miss me?”
This is his fear, that she – the one he really loves – will say No. That he does not figure into her post life in the least regard. She will say No and he will wonder why. Is it because she feels betrayed? Slighted? Used? Manipulated? Perhaps she has moved on? If she feels these things, it’s because she doesn’t understand his enduring love for her. A truly undying, burdensome love from which he cannot be absolved, in which he can finally indulge.
He apologizes to her. “If only you knew what this has been like for me.”
“Have there been others?”
This question makes him nervous. But he proceeds: “There have. Many others. But I’ve always loved you and have always wanted to spend eternity with you.”
She reacts poorly, jealously, like a teenage girl. He is put off. She has other questions, prying questions, uncomfortable questions: how many women, how many died, how many did he love – questions like that. He answers them all, kind of, without incriminating himself fully.
“Go to hell, K,” she bellows finally and retreats into the recesses of the other woman’s insides. He reaches out for her but she is gone. He calls for her, desperation on the edge of his words. He calls again. She is gone. He does not follow because he enjoys the pain of being walked away from.
He is alone again, agitated and restless. He screams, filling the woman’s insides with his frustration. He screams again, stamping his feet like a child.
When he rouses himself from this twisted and incomprehensible revelry, he is pressing the woman’s head to the porcelain floor of his bathtub. At some point she stopped struggling, but he was too wound up in his own ego to notice. He was too wound up in his own ego to notice a lot: love, compassion, understanding; terror, violence, deception.
He presses down harder on her head, making small undulations in the water in which she has drowned.
He crawls into the bath, wraps her water-logged head in his arms, presses it to his chest.
“All of this for you,” he whispers, addressing nobody at all.
