The Suicide Room by Adam Ross / Fiction / Untitled Books

"There's no such thing as a defining moment," Will said. "We invent defining moments."

The Suicide Room by Adam Ross

We were sitting on the fifth floor of Will's dorm room, smoking pot, when the conversation turned to death.

"My sister, Elise, saw her boyfriend get killed in a car wreck," Casey said. She exhaled contemplatively, blowing a stream of smoke toward the lit end of the joint, which she held like a cigarette. "They'd left this party together. But they were in separate cars. And . . . what was his name - Doug! He was driving behind her. He had all these kids from the party piled in his dad's Mustang. Apparently he wasn't drunk or anything, but they were driving on this winding road along the coast near our house, and the next thing Elise sees in the rearview mirror is the Mustang crashing through the guardrail and going over the cliff."

"She saw this?" Alyssa said.

Casey passed her the joint and she took a hit even though she didn't like pot. Casey and Will were both seniors; they'd been a couple since the dawn of time. I was going to break up with Alyssa that night, but she didn't know it yet. It was 1986, and we'd just started our sophomore year.

"Just like I said, she saw them go over the cliff. That was it."

"Did the other kids in the car die?"

I couldn't tell if Alyssa was really taken with the story, or just trying to feign deep concern to a girl higher up on the social ladder.

"Yes," Casey said. "And no. Including Dave, the boyfriend, there were five kids in the car, and three of them died, one ended up a paraplegic, and the fifth, who wasn't wearing a seat belt, got thrown from the car and hooked on a branch. He hung there like a cartoon character until the fire department came."

"You're full of shit," Will said.

Casey shot him a look. "I'm not full of shit." They already communicated like an eternally married couple, their expressions registering with each other as clearly as if they were telepathic. "This was a legendary tragedy in my high school and a defining moment in my sister's life."

"There's no such thing as a defining moment," Will said. "We invent defining moments."

"Well, aren't you a fucking philosopher."

"How come I've never heard this story before? How did this one escape me?"

"Maybe you weren't listening. You never listen." She burst out laughing. We all did, then stared at one another's feet.

"I don't know anyone personally who's died," Alyssa said after a while. "Not that I'm rushing to have that experience." She was part Lebanese and had short dark hair, olive-colored skin, and enormous brown eyes - just heart-stoppingly beautiful. Occasionally I caught Will looking at her, enthralled, and it pleased me. She was trophy-pretty and just as smart as hell, and there was a feeling of one-upmanship in his admiration of her that I couldn't help but enjoy.

"But my brother was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck and it caused severe brain damage, so I guess he's kind of dead."

Alyssa considered her brother for a moment. She had that far- off look you don't realize you get when you're stoned. I thought she might even cry, though she was rarely sentimental about Danny. I personally found him frightening, and not at all worthy of tears. I'd met him this past summer- though you don't meet Danny so much as see him-when I'd spent the weekend with Alyssa at her house, ostensibly to take care of her younger sister and brother while her parents went out of town, but really so we could fuck every free minute that we had. Danny was the eldest sibling and very tall, easily six foot two. He was olive- skinned like his sisters, but slack- looking in the eyes. We all stood in the kitchen together while Alyssa's mother laid down the law for the weekend, and Alyssa's father, who was a plaintiffs' attorney for Vietnam veterans and scary rich, was standing with Danny and me by the padlocked kitchen cabinets. (Even the refrigerator had a digital keypad.) Danny was shifting his weight back and forth and watching his father the way a dog watches someone eat, which Mr. Richardson eventually noticed.

"You want some cereal?" he asked Danny.

Alyssa's father stood with his hands in his pockets, looking at his son warmly, almost proudly. There was an element of self- consciousness to the whole display, and I observed it carefully, because I enjoy moments when people think they're fooling me.

To his father's question, Danny made a happy grunt like, Gyah.

"Let's get you some cereal, kid."

Mr. Richardson unlocked the top cabinet, where the cereal was kept, right in front of Danny, who obviously couldn't remember the combination, and in front of me, of course, as if to demonstrate that no matter how brutally retarded his son was, the two of them could communicate man- to- man, as if asking him if he'd like a bowl of Crunchberries was like going to a bar together to knock back a few beers. I thought the whole performance was sad, and though I listened attentively while Mr. Richardson showed me where the combinations for the locks were kept - literally every cabinet was padlocked - perhaps I appeared intimidated by the whole thing, because Alyssa gently pressed her hand on my back and whispered for me not to worry, that she'd handle feeding her brother.

The next morning I went to the kitchen to get some orange juice, and when I closed the refrigerator door Danny was standing there looking down at me, as naked as the day he was born and scaring me silly. Danny gave an amazed laugh, and pointed at the juice. "Joos," he said, "Joos", and then went for it with both hands, wiggling his fingers delightedly. He took the carton out of my terrified grasp and proceeded to drink the whole gallon, the liquid running down the sides of his mouth. He was like a giant goldfish, I realized. The padlocked cabinets suddenly made sense; they were there to protect him from blowing himself up. He finished and looked at me and said, "Ahhhhh," then burped wetly, handed the empty carton back, and peered over my shoulder into the lit shelves, but I'd managed to lock the door before he could raid anything else. Needless to say, I got the hell out of there as fast as I could.

"That doesn't count as a death," I told Alyssa.

"We mean death in the pornographic sense," said Casey.

"As in eye-witnessed," Will said.

"I saw my grandfather get killed," I offered.

"No," Alyssa said.

I nodded. "He was a big cigar smoker. Loved to smoke them while he golfed, read the paper, took a shit. I smell cigars and I think of him. It's Pavlovian. Anyway, two years ago, he was eighty- four and healthy as a horse and then he went to light a cigar in his workshop - he made his own golf clubs - and the lighter blew up in his
face."

"What?" Will said.

"Blew up. Apparently he'd filled it with the wrong fluid and it was explosive. I came down to his workshop just by chance afterward and he was rolling on the floor trying to put himself out."

"Shut up," Casey said. She was thin in the face and flat-chested and liked to reach out and touch the people she was talking with - she had my forearm in her hands at that very moment. She was so confident in her sexuality, so sure of how she took hold of you or pulled you toward her, she was like a full-grown woman. We'd been fucking for a few weeks now, unbeknownst to Will or Alyssa.

This all seemed dangerous and delightful to me at the time, and so far as I was concerned none of this sneaking around had any real moral weight.

"So what happened?" Alyssa said. She began rubbing my neck while Casey still had my arm in her hands and was giving me a delicious Indian burn. I wanted Will to disappear, or fall unconscious.

"I put him out. But I made this terrible mistake, though I didn't know it was at the time. I threw my shirt over his face to snuff out the flames, and his skin stuck to the fabric."

Will winced. Both girls stopped cold.

I affected a faraway look. Not indifferent, more transfixed. "By then, my grandmother had come downstairs and had seen what was happening, and called 911. The medics came. It was totally insane. Anyway, he suffered third- degree burns on his neck and face and died of an infection a few days later."

This elicited a stunned silence. Finally, Will said, "I don't think I can top that."

"Top it?" Casey said. "Are you sick? This is his grandfather."

"It's all right. I'm okay with it. He lived a good life."

"You were so brave," Alyssa said.

I was lying through my teeth, of course. My grandfather loved golf but hated cigars, and he was still very much alive. I'd heard this story from a high school friend over the summer and thought it was remarkable, so I'd adopted it and given it wings - I added the bit about the shirt - and told it every chance I got. It conferred on me, I thought, a bizarre sort of glamour.

"My personal and only witnessed-death story," Will jumped in, "was my uncle Nick's, who, I should add, I didn't like. He had lung cancer and it spread everywhere, though in spite of this he kept busy dying for what seemed like, I don't know, a year. Toward the end, there was this big family gathering - he was my mother's brother - out at his house in Seattle, which so far as I could figure out as a kid was a wait around-for-Uncle-Nick to-die party. I mean this literally. That's why I thought we were there. There were flowers everywhere and even a casket in the dining room, which at one point Uncle Nick went to lie in just to get the feel of it, and that was a strange thing to see. But I thought this was kind of the opposite of a birthday party and that at some point, just like the cake coming out, the guy was eventually going to sign off. I was seven years old and the concept of death only made sense to me as a very long trip you took, somewhere remote and possibly even fun, in spite of all the grief I'd been seeing, so I was actually pretty excited. For the party my uncle's hospital bed had been moved into the living room and there were people everywhere, drinking, eating, talking. He'd been on the verge of croaking for so many months I guess nobody felt like it should interfere with a good time. Anyway, after what seems like so long I can barely contain myself, my mother comes up to me crying and says, `Will, it's time to say good-bye to Uncle Nick.' And because it was time for me to say good-bye, and because kids always think they're the center of the universe, I thought he was going to die right then - and that I was somehow holding everything up. So I hurry over to his bedside. The guy had so many tubes coming out of him he looked like he was lying in a plastic hammock. I'm sitting there pumping my leg and he's staring at the ceiling, and I don't know what to do. I don't know if I'm supposed to sing some song or say a magic word, so I wait as patiently as I can until he finally notices me and says, 'Who are you?' 'I'm Will,' I say. 'That means nothing to me,' he says. 'Be more specific.' 'You're my uncle,' I say. 'I'm your sister's son.' 'Which sister?' `Jenny.' He says, 'Oh.' Then he looks up at the ceiling again and says, 'My death doesn't belong to me. That's the thing about dying slowly. You're not dead yet, but people are already fitting your last rites into their schedule. You can see it in their eyes. This might be the last time I see him. There's no dignity in that. Do you understand?' 'No,' I say. 'No? Well, let's make it simple. Try to die quick. Not soon, but quick. Get it?' 'Yes, sir.' He doesn't speak for a while and I start to get anxious again because I still don't know what to do, but then he looks at me and goes, 'Do you want to know what pains me most about my life? The thing I regret most?' I'm like, 'Sir?' 'The women I could've fucked,' he says, 'but didn't. It's all I think about. I lie here, start chronologically, and go back as far as sixth grade to some time as recent as last year, thinking about all the opportunities for pussy that I didn't take, and it makes me want to cry. Do you like girls?' 'No,' I say. `Well, I did. I do. And I should have fondled Milly Bear's fat tits before I met your aunt Carol. I should've squeezed Liz Coleman's ass and sucked Kathy Koch's nipples. But I didn't because I was afraid. Know why?' 'No.' `Because I thought it meant something not to. That holding myself back registered somewhere. But it means nothing not to. It doesn't register anywhere. I want you to remember that. Tell me you'll remember.' 'I will.' `Good,' he says. 'Someone is spared.' Then he puts his hands over his eyes and lays there mumbling these women's names, and I can't stand it because I'm not only getting bored with the Q & A, but also tired of waiting for the main event. So I say, 'Uncle, can I ask you something?' And then he coughs really hard for a while and finally gasps, 'Go ahead.' And I say, 'Are you going to die now?' And he looks at the ceiling and says, 'Yes, now I'm going to die.' Then he made a sound like a tire deflating, and boom, I swear to God, my aunt Carol keels over right behind us, dead of a massive aneurysm."

For some reason, this story just killed me - I was sure Will meant it to be funny - and I laughed so hard I went fetal. The guy could string me out from the get-go and then pull me back in at his leisure, and this was the power I coveted above all his others.

"Will, I'm so sorry," Alyssa said. She seemed taken aback by my reaction and reached out and touched Will's shoulder, then ran her fingers over his neck, which surprised Casey as much as it did me, because we both looked at each other. In fact, it made Casey clearly and instantly jealous.

"Don't be sorry," he said. "Griffin's right. It was funny."

"You never told me that story," Casey said. She took the last drag on the joint, squinting extra ferociously as she inhaled. "How did that one escape me?"

"Yeah, well, nobody knows everything about anyone." Will, who'd just rolled another bone and was holding it toward me, looked me right in the eye, which made me instantly paranoid. Did he know I was fucking Casey? Following this train of thought was very bad, so I recited the mental mantra I employed whenever I got stoned: Grass makes you an ass. It calmed me down, and Will had already shifted his attention to Alyssa. "I mean that," he said to her. "You can develop a whole moral philosophy around that fact. I've been reading Levinas's Totality and Infinity. His idea that the Other is an infinite . . ."

Will began explaining Levinas to Alyssa, who was as enthralled with him as he seemed to be with her. I thought he was trying to get into her pants, and while that might solve some logistical problems, I couldn't bear how jealous it was making Casey, so I got up and checked out his room, which never ceased to fascinate me. He had two four- foot- tall speakers pointed out his windows, because whenever he cranked up his stereo he wanted to share his musical taste with the whole quad. A big fan of Black Flag and The Replacements and the Butthole Surfers, he had their posters all over his walls, and though I appreciated these outward signs of allegiance, I found the stuff so impossible to listen to that I wondered if I was lacking in musical knowledge. I needed to add some genre to compliment my personality, to be deeply into something. I just hadn't figured out what yet. Will was not only on the cutting edge musically but also technologically: the hutch above his desk was stuffed with green circuitry boards, floppy disks, wire clippers, a soldering iron. He'd programmed his Macintosh to do all sorts of things, like act as an alarm clock and answering machine; he used HyperCard to create outlines for classes and played strategy and role playing games on it like Mine Hunter that to me seemed wildly complicated. He was one of the head techs at the college's computer lab and had a campus radio show, "Rumor Will," long musical sets interrupted by programs about the student body and faculty, which he did a la Saturday Night Live's "Weekend
Update." He was head of a crew that had the coveted Thursday evening shift at the Rathskeller's downstairs bar. He was so whole that you could tell he would make a bright new place for himself in the world. There was a black- and- white poster on his wall of his father sitting in one of those phallic race cars, wearing a helmet and goggles and waving as he crossed the finish line. When I'd asked Will about it, he told me his dad was in a club back home and had built that car from the ground up. And it didn't occur to me that a man who belonged to such a club was rich, or that at my age Will was probably trying to figure out how to get rich enough to belong to such a club.

"You know," Will told Alyssa, "death's right here in this building."

Casey rolled her eyes at me. "Here we go."

"You know what I'm talking about, don't you?"

"No," Alyssa said.

"I'm talking about room nine-E."

"Jesus fucking Christ," Casey said.

"What's in nine-E?" Alyssa asked. She looked at Casey, then at me (and I'd heard all the stories). She was a double major in psychology and biology but lacked a single imaginative bone in her lovely body.

"It's the room where Patricia Wilkes hung herself from the pipes our freshman year," Will explained. "It's been boarded up ever since. Seeing as Miss Alyssa has never been in the presence of death, I say we break in there and have a look."

This was a nice play on Will's part. If Casey was so pissed off at his flirting, for all he cared she could stay the hell put while he took Alyssa on a little adventure. From my end I thought it would give Casey and me some time alone, but she had that look on her face that she got when we had sex: the inwardness of someone testing a physical limit, like a dancer stretching a tender muscle. I'd watch her buck on top of me while this expression came over her and feel like I was almost incidental to her pleasure. All of which is to say I didn't know what she was thinking.

"Why would we want to go there?" Alyssa asked.

"Because supposedly nothing in the room has been disturbed. All of Patricia's family pictures are still inside. Her clothes are still in the drawers. Her Garfield posters are still up on the walls. Everything. It's like a museum."

"Really?"

"You're pissing me off, Will."

I didn't need this from Casey. She had a temper and things could go south between them in a hurry, and if they did there'd be no us, at least not tonight. She'd spend the next few hours, maybe even days, fighting with him, and their fights were notorious. At the beginning of the semester, just before we'd started up, she became convinced Will was having an affair with a friend of hers. The story was that she came into his room and confronted him about it. He was sitting at his computer and turned to her, calmly denied everything, and then went back to the paper he was writing, at which point she grabbed a large flashlight and smashed it right across his skull. Dazed, he stumbled out of his room with his head gushing blood, truly afraid for his life and concussed so severely that his feet were crossing one over the other like he was drunk, while Casey ran after him, sobbing and wailing, "I'm sorry, sweetheart, I'm so sorry, oh, Will, you fucking asshole, I'm so sorry." I'd heard this story before I'd said a word to either of them. It preceded them, like the rumble you hear of a train when you put your ear to the rail. Their relationship had this sort of legendary dimension, and I was always impressed by their capacity to conflagrate or implode and inflict harm on each other.

I wanted that. Not the violence, but the intensity of feeling. That summer, the weekend I'd spent at Alyssa's house, on our last night together, after we tucked Danny in we made a bed of comforters on the floor in front of the television upstairs and screwed during Austin City Limits. Afterward, she sat up watching the show while I lay against the couch. Alyssa has large breasts, beautiful and upturned like ice cream curled in a scoop, her areolas brown as cocoa, and I stared at her while she watched the screen, her body's edges traced in light. "I love you," I told her. When she didn't respond, I said it again, and even she knew I didn't mean it. But I believed that if I verbalized it the feeling itself might come, as a vine grows toward the nearest higher thing. "I appreciate that," she said, "I really do. But right now I don't feel that way." Then she went back to watching the show.

Alyssa had a boyfriend at the time, Anthony Geddis, who played lacrosse with me. She showed up at all of our games, but I hadn't noticed her until the end of the spring. On break I'd gone to Laguna Beach with a bunch of guys - eight of us piled into a VW bus, road- tripping south to Rosarito - and one afternoon we stood in a circle in the ocean and played a game of tag where the person who was "it" had to spit on someone, and if you managed to dive underwater before the gob hit you, you were safe. While we played we threw out names of girls at school, ranking them in order of beauty and desirability, skankiness and sexual prowess, responding to each like applause- o-meters, supplying inside information when required, and when Alyssa came up the reaction was so thunderously appreciative it could've attracted sharks. At that moment I decided she would be mine, no matter what. The minute we returned from spring break I pursued her with a relentlessness even I didn't understand - until she finally broke down that summer. Once we got back to school in the fall, she confessed our affair to Anthony, we started dating again, and by September's end she professed her love to me. "I'm yours," she said, "you win."

Both the victory and the concession repulsed me deeply. A few weeks later, Casey and I started up.

"I think I would like to see that room," Alyssa said to Will, without looking to me for approval. I became paranoid again. Was she breaking up with me? Had she been doing it with him all along? Did Will lace my joint with cyanide? Grass makes you an ass.

They got up to leave, and since I never took the lead with Casey, I waited to see what she was going to do. She stood up, crossed her arms, and with one hand indicated the door, so I obediently walked ahead. I wasn't sure what to think about this. Maybe she sensed I was kind of reeling, because before we were out of the room she slid up behind me, squeezed my ass and, in what I took to be a boost to my failing morale, sang, "Don't fear the reaper," waiting, I guessed, for me to sing the next line - or at least to buck up.

I wasn't afraid of death so much as getting in trouble. According to dorm rules, the suicide room was off- limits, and Will needed very little encouragement to do something risky. He was currently in an ongoing competition with Johnny Manion, a rugby player and all- around psycho, in which they attempted to do "the craziest thing." The game had started up a few weeks ago and was like a hybrid of Uncle and Chicken. If you couldn't top the other person's feat, you lost, each successive stunt requiring increased levels of recklessness and potential pain. Will began by sneaking into the chancellor's office and replacing the picture of her husband with one of John Holmes, the porn star. Manion considered that bush- league and proceeded to appear in an art- history class completely naked. Not to be outdone, Will jumped from the third story of the chemistry building onto a small sofa. This put him on crutches for two weeks, but sent Manion pondering. A week later, he stood with us outside his terrace apartment during a keg party and, in a moment of inspiration, began to eat moths, plucking them one by one off the wall by his porch light. His lips were covered with moth dust afterward; he looked like he'd been snacking on a crumb cake made of slate. He ate fifteen in all. At this point, Will considered conceding, but then got his nerve back. "I'm still in," he told Manion, nodding determinedly. "I didn't doubt it for a second," Manion said, then vomited in a steady stream at our feet. That was a week ago. Will was planning his next move.

It was a Friday night, but early enough in the evening that in order to break into 9-E we'd need some kind of distraction. There'd be people milling around the halls, playing music, hanging out in their rooms, and since I was a follower in this expedition I let Will sort out the details. We took the elevator upstairs, but Will pushed the eighth floor instead of the ninth. When the door opened he said, "You three go up. I'll be right there." He walked out of the elevator and looked up and down the hall, then said hello to someone. The elevator door closed. It was a slow car, and as we rose we heard the building's fire alarm go off. By the time the door opened on nine, people were heading for the stairs.

We waited in the hallway for the floor to clear out. There was a guy still sitting in his room, blowing a bong hit out the window. "You fucking lemmings!" he screamed over the quad. The three of us were standing in his doorway and he turned around to look at us. "Don't be fooled," he assured us. "It's just another false alarm. It's always a false alarm!" he screamed toward the quad again. "So unless I see flames, I'm squatting."

Will appeared at the stairwell and led us to the infamous room. At the end of the hall, 9- E was literally boarded up, with two- by- fours X - ed across the frame. We stood there a minute while Will rubbed his chin. He yanked at one of the boards, even pressed both feet against the wall and pulled, but it was hopeless. They were screwed into the jamb. He looked around, said "Stay here," then opened the window at the end of the hallway and climbed out. Alyssa, Casey, and I watched him step over the fire escape's railing and move out of sight.

A few seconds later we heard a window break. Then the door opened.

"Welcome," Will said, standing behind the X s in the doorframe, "to the suicide room."

He helped us through the spaces between the boards, and closed the door.

I admit my heart was racing. Once my eyes adjusted to the dark - the overhead bulb had long since burned out - I took in our surroundings. The room was noticeably colder than the hallway, and the floor was dusty. Realizing the place was empty of artifacts, I was more afraid for my sinuses than my soul. The bed frame was still here but the mattress was gone. The bureau was empty. We looked up at the pipes but didn't expect to see any signs of a hanging, since we'd all dangled from them in our rooms at one time or other, had chin- up contests or monkey bar races along their length. But Alyssa was impressed that we were actually here and, wanting to give Will some sort of credit for his efforts, she crossed her arms and rubbed them with her hands and said, "It's cold as death."

Will glanced at me, and we both rolled our eyes.

"How the hell did you get in here?" Casey said.

"The window."

Casey walked over to the broken window and looked down.

Alyssa and I joined her.

"I know the window, dickweed, but how did you get to the window?"

Will pressed between us and poked his head out.

"I climbed over the fire escape," he said, pointing, "then walked along this ledge and kicked in the pane."

The ledge was perhaps two inches wide. It jutted out from the building and was decorated every few feet with remarkable gargoyles. I figured the distance from the fire escape (nine feet), looked for handholds in between (none I could see), considered the height (nine stories), then factored in the nerve and coordination required for such a maneuver - including the logistical difficulty of having enough of a purchase to kick in the window - and I almost didn't believe it.

"You're a sick boy," Casey said.

"You think people really die if they dream of falling and then land?" Will asked.

"That's a myth," Alyssa told him. "Like wanting to sleep with your mother."

"But if it isn't, is that considered suicide?"

"Me," Casey declared, "I'd gas myself. I'd do a Sylvia P lath. It'd be like an eternal whip-it."

"You mean `the whip-it to eternity,' " I said.

Casey made a face at me. "What- fucking- ever."

"I can't imagine anything more selfish," Alyssa said, "than taking your own life."

I looked down the nine-story drop and considered my own options if I were to commit suicide. Things could go wrong with a hanging. The cord might snap. The pipe might bend and break. Failure could mean brain damage. Same with sticking a gun in your mouth. If you slashed your wrists you might lose your nerve during the time it took to bleed out, leaving you with nothing to show for it but scars that signified your own treacherous neuroses - aces up your sleeves, if you were comparing extreme personal experiences, but ultimately a party trick that embarrassed the magician. Or you could just fail somehow. Fail stupidly. Clumsily. Failure at committing suicide, I thought, could have worse lasting effects on a person than any missed at-the-buzzer jump shot or misspelled word during a spelling bee. It was a real-life failure, a lack of planning and attention to detail that would follow you through your days like a prison record. Fail at this, I figured, and chances were good that you'd permanently doubt your ability to carry off anything difficult for the rest of your life.

"I'd jump," I said, but no one seemed to be listening.

The fire alarm stopped. You don't realize how quickly you adjust to noise until it ceases.

"We should probably leave," Will suggested.

We climbed out through the boards, but instead of going back downstairs to Will's room we climbed out the hall window and sat down on the fire escape. Nine stories below, the fire engines had arrived in the quad, their strobes spinning silently, and we sat in the warm night with our feet dangling through the bars and watched as the firemen walked into the building, helmets off, their own keen sense for false alarms confirmed. Hundreds of dorm kids milled around in the red and white light, unaware that all of this was nothing serious, a lie like the one I'd told about my grandfather. And in that quiet moment watching this sight, I enjoyed the nearest thing I can remember now to an animal peace. I was content. I suffered no thoughts of the future, had no stress or worries or responsibilities and was briefly, blissfully aware of this. We were well above the tops of the trees, which were many stories high themselves, and in the building's floodlights they cast massive shadows, the wind playing through their leaves like a long, steady aspiration, as if the world itself were breathing. The fact was I didn't suffer enough from anything to seriously consider suicide or any other self- destructive act, and I wonder now if that's enough to be thankful for. Is a life of such relative luxury and comfort an embarrassment of riches, or a horrible sort of poverty?

This moment was interrupted by the appearance of Johnny Manion, who sat down cross- legged behind Will and pointed at his watch. "Time's running out, Will. The glove's been thrown down, and you've got to make a move."

"I know. I've been mulling it over and I think I'm ready."

"I know I'm ready," Manion said. "I'm ready to be wowed."

As I mentioned, he was a rugby player, a flanker. He had a beak nose, hooked at the end like a vulture's, bugged- out eyes like Marty Feldman's, and a high head of uncontrollably curly hair. This, I thought, was someone who looked in the mirror every morning and thought: Why? He didn't have the bulk you'd imagine someone in his sport would need. But I'd played touch football against him, and he was deservedly famous on campus for his speed and split dodge, the latter so devastating it nailed your cleats to the turf. He had thighs that were thickly muscled and disproportionately large, like the tires on a redneck's monster pickup.

"It's going to be untoppable," said Will. "It's going to demand your instant concession of victory."

"I'm quaking," Manion said. "I'm listening carefully."

"Honestly, the idea itself is so daring that you might have to concede before I even begin."

"I don't underestimate you, Will, I never have, and what I'm feeling right now, inside my chest, is basically suspense."

"I'm going to kill myself," Will said.

Nobody reacted as if this statement were remotely out of the ordinary.

Manion nodded. "Strong. Inspired. Still, I don't believe you."

Casey was ignoring Will, so he leaned toward her.

"I am going to kill myself," he said, "because no one gives a shit if I do."

He leaned across me to say this to her, and in profile they looked alike, with the same long, delicate nose and Roman profile. He, too, had thin lips and long limbs, and a strong grip that surprised you. He and Casey could be brother and sister.

She rolled her eyes.

"But you're right," Will said to Manion, sitting back. "I'm not going to kill myself. But if I were to kill myself " - he leaned toward Casey again - "I'd do it only out of deep passion. Because I would've been brave enough to let myself be shattered. I would do it as a testament to some sort of remarkable love, the kind that you read about in Shakespeare or Tolstoy or who- the- fuck- ever. But something you protect at all costs. Do you get it?"

Manion cleared his throat. "No. But does that mean I win?"

Will relaxed again and slumped forward, letting his arms dangle through the bars. It was hard to tell if this monologue was simply a performance or a true expression of emotion, but I took it as the latter. I loved being around Casey and Will, because in their presence I felt I was in contact with real feeling. I had the sense, watching them carefully, quietly, that I was witnessing something ineluctable. They needed each other so much they'd already lost the ability to imagine life apart. When you're nineteen years old, need like that is a remarkable thing to observe.

"Instead," Will went on, "I'm going to walk around this whole dorm, along this ledge. And if this ends with my falling to my death, you're going to have to concede, obviously, and you're going to have to tell everyone the version I prefer, which is that I told you I'd kill myself and then went and did it. This guarantees my legendary status at our beloved alma mater. It puts me up there with Patricia Wilkes and that guy who fell off the catwalk at Main last year and Dave Hendrick's three-day acid trip. What do you say?"

"I say you're on."

Will stood up and retied his shoelaces in double knots, then looked at Casey and said, "I'll be back," as if he were an astronaut going out for a pack of cigarettes.

"Whatever." Casey shrugged, though I could tell she was too afraid to look.

"You don't have to do this," Alyssa said. "Really. I don't think it's a good idea." She was too scared to understand the exchange that had just occurred. I found her lack of perception as insufferable as Casey's anxiety for Will, and a sudden feeling of loneliness gusted through me so powerfully I shivered.

"No," he said, "it's not."

He stepped over the fire escape and, with his right hand holding the railing and right foot still on the grate, placed his left foot onto the ledge. He turned away from us, then ran his left palm along the building's face, finding a hold and pinching the brick. He pressed his cheek to the wall and paused for a moment, making some sort of inner adjustment of his body's ballast and a preparatory twist of the ball of his left foot. When he stepped off the fire escape, his whole right side was momentarily suspended over space until he closed onto the wall, his arms outstretched and his legs wide apart, looking as though he'd been splayed against the building by a giant.

He began to move, and it was like watching a starfish advance along the sea floor, his legs and arms active but the rest of his body still, every inch he gained along this horizontal path rippling from left foot to calf to thigh to buttock, from left hand to wrist to arm to shoulder, then expanding out to his right side. Like Will, we forgot about the height out of necessity and were transfixed by his concentration - too focused to be scared. He paused at the window ledge where he'd broken into the room earlier, a stop that appeared to be a physical relief to him, what with its various handholds, easy to negotiate by comparison to moving across the building's face. He soon resumed, going through the same act of maintaining his balance. After several breathless minutes, he arrived at the building's corner - a stage that required serious consideration - and in a fluid, confident move stepped out of our view.

Alyssa, Casey, Manion, and I looked at one another like we'd just seen someone blip out of existence, then laughed giddily and ran inside.

We began, singly or in pairs, sometimes as a foursome, to follow Will's progress around the building. We went from dorm room to dorm room as he advanced along the perimeter, all of them unlocked and empty since everyone had bolted after the fire alarm, catching glimpses of him as he slid past the windows or waiting two rooms ahead, throwing open the panes and rooting him on. At other moments we just watched silently as he passed, then raced out and barreled into another room. Will moved very slowly, resting for minutes at a time, and certain parts of his journey were dicier than others. At these points we'd separate into pairs, to get a look at where he was stuck or do reconnaissance for any upcoming obstacles - potted plants or empty beer bottles - and call out to one another from our different stations when his position seemed particularly precarious. We were like a bike racer's support team, and as Will rounded the second corner in his Spider- Man crawl he gained confidence and speed.

I was waiting in a room several yards from his position when Casey slid up behind me, pressed her hips into mine, and stuck both her hands in my front pockets. "Find me later," she whispered, kissing the back of my neck.

"Where?"

"I'll sleep in my own room tonight."

"Are you sure?"

"Positive."

She turned me around. She took clumps of my hair in her hands and fed on my mouth, sucking on my top lip, biting it. I grabbed hold of her jeans at the waist and pulled her into me and she climbed up my body, hooking her ankles behind my knees and wrapping her arms around my neck, and we stood there like a circus act. She was surprisingly strong and she seemed keenly satisfied to have climbed me. We kissed once more before she jumped off me, and there was Will at the soot-dark window, either staring at us or - like Casey during sex - focused inward, assessing the state of his body's endurance and balance, working out problems I was neither privy to nor able to understand. He didn't react as if he'd seen us, but he was right there, and the sight of him made my heart jump.

We continued around the rooms as Will approached the home stretch, across the back of the building and around the final corner. "Holy shit," Casey said, in a tone that pained me, "that son of a bitch is going to do it." She and Alyssa barreled out the door to the fire escape. Manion and I were alone for a moment in the last room that Will would pass. We could hear the girls cheering outside. "You can do it, Will," they screamed. "You're almost there."

"I can't top that," Manion said, smiling and shaking his head, his appreciation palpable. "I just can't."

Then he joined the girls on the fire escape.

I watched Will through his last window. The pane was open, so I could've touched him, even given him a little push. Or I could've reached out and held him by the belt, told him the game was over, that Manion had conceded, and helped him climb inside. But games have their own momentum, and I didn't do any of these things before the end, though I want to fast- forward and talk about what became of everyone before I get to that. This is a story about college, after all, and like most people I check the class notes in my alumnae quarterly to see who's doing what, if for no other reason than to compare my life to theirs and get a sense of my place in what feels like a race, even if it isn't one. So:

Alyssa Richardson became a neurosurgeon specializing in hemispherectomy, an astonishing procedure used to treat severely epileptic children. The storming half of the brain is disconnected from its healthy counterpart, or in some cases even removed. These are performed only on the very young, when the organ is most plastic and the remaining hemisphere can take over the tasks of its darkened opposite. It gives patients something resembling a normal life, and I imagine her brother's condition could be said to have inspired this breakthrough. She married her prior boyfriend, and they're the proud parents of Leslie, five, and Danny, three.
E- mail her at geddisbunch@ gmail.com or friend her on F acebook.

Casey Connor went into marketing. She married Manny Swift, MIT '85, who made a fortune in the mid-nineties developing web-streaming technologies. They had two boys, Will and Toby, and were living quite happily in San Francisco until Casey had an affair with Manny's business partner (I got this part through the grapevine). So it seems she needed to repeat the sort of episode that I had the pleasure of being part of years ago but never got close enough to understand. Casey currently lives in Atlanta; she's a junior VP at Coca-Cola and apparently doing her best to boost their falling stock price. I'm sure she'd love to hear from anyone in the class of '87.

Johnny Manion became a successful commodities trader. He married Alicia Febliss and had four children in quick succession, barely a year apart. He was on the eighty- ninth floor of Two World Trade Center when the first plane hit on September 11. He and three associates immediately decided to evacuate and urged their colleagues to join them, but they were ignored. Some of them had been through the '93 bombing, and they considered this a false alarm. Manion's group took the stairs to their terminus at the sky lobby on the forty-fourth floor, and here they wavered, along with people from offices on other floors who were also uncertain what to do. The mood was upbeat, borderline anarchic, like a high school fire drill. Manion's team decided to return to work, crossed to the other elevator bank, and again Manion hesitated, watching with a sense of dread while the car filled up. He boarded last, just as the doors closed and the second plane hit. The impact ejected his group from the elevator but sent the remaining passengers plummeting to their deaths when the fireball instantly melted the cables. He quit trading immediately afterward and now practices Chinese medicine, something he'd always dreamed of but never had the guts to do.

As for me, I became a writer, and every job I've ever held or choice I've ever made has been ancillary to this task. This means I'm free to embellish, to treat memory as fact or shape it to suit whatever I'm working on. My primary responsibility, I suppose, is to set you dreaming. If that requires me to alter things, then I will, though I can't change what follows because it's true:

Will fell. This was, as he predicted, a legendary tragedy at my college and a defining moment in my life. There he was - a moving, life-sized X - just a few feet away from me, then he stumbled over a gargoyle and disappeared. The fire department turned around and came back to campus, the police questioned all four of us, and Alyssa, Manion, Casey, and I received counseling for the rest of the semester. Will's parents sued the hell out of our beloved alma mater, where nowadays when you open a window onto a fire escape an alarm will sound.

You see, it turns out that Will was wrong about defining moments. We don't invent them; they happen to us. And I think about that night all the time. That was the night I woke up. For the first time in my life, I started to feel whole. Because from that night forward, as often as possible, I began asking myself: What are you doing? This isn't to say I necessarily do the right thing. It just means that I can't say I didn't think about it. That it can be a beautiful autumn evening, and the best or worst day you've ever known, and it doesn't matter. That given a minuscule ledge or a length of rope, you can contrive your own death, whether you meant to or not.

.........................................................................................................................................................
Ladies and Gentleman, the new collection of short stories by Adam Ross, is published by Jonathan Cape.
.........................................................................................................................................................

Thursday, 12 January, 2012

In Short stories

More

Untitled Books

Your account

Untitled Books

Issue 41 / February 2012

"There's no such thing as a defining moment," Will said. "We invent defining moments."