Pain, Without Love

No one believes in coincidence anymore. That's why it's my fault he's dead.

 

I’m curious:  how do you convince your own brain that a particular suicide wasn’t your fault?

 

            What if it’s not a matter of intellectual?  Sensibly, no suicide is anyone’s fault but the one who committed the crime.  By then, the criminal is dead.  Weird, considering it’s supposed to be a crime, but there’s no one to convict.

 

            The question might make more sense if I explain myself.  To do that, I have to go back to my childhood.

 

            To me, it seemed I was destined to become an author.  By first grade I was reading chapter books, like The Boxcar Children and Nancy Drew.  (I’ll confess—I didn’t like Nancy Drew.  I thought she was terribly boring.  But children learning to survive in a boxcar?  Now that’s a tale that grasps the imagination.)  In third grade I was telling my teachers, “I don’t need math.  I’m gonna write.”  Of course, they told me I didn’t know that, and I ought to study my multiplication anyway.

 

            The Christmas of grade five, my grandmother sent me three books.  The covers looked scary; one had three girls with a wicked-looking boy in a cloak looming behind them.  But they were a gift, and my mother scolded me for not reading my gifts.  At last, I reluctantly opened one—Daughters of Darkness by L.J. Smith.  I read.  And when I finished that one, I picked up the next.  And then the next.  Within a week I was asking my mother to take me to the bookstore so I could find the beginning of this wondrous series.

 

            And thus I was hooked.  I became enamored with the stories of wickedly beautiful vampires finding their human soulmates; witch girls breaking the laws of their secret society because they found their one and only in a human boy; shapeshifters fighting destiny in all the wrong places.

 

            I read them all.  Then I sat down for the first time and wrote my own story.

 

            From age twelve on, I wrote.  I came home from school only to ignore my homework, bring up a word document, and spin whatever tales came to mind.  I read other works.  I experimented.  Out came stories of not just vampires and werewolves, but girls with mysterious psychic powers, teenagers who discovered bloodlust, young couples who fought magical obstacles, humans who struggled against a destructive alien invasion.  It didn’t matter the genre; if I thought of it, I wrote it.

 

            And wrote it.

 

            And wrote it some more.

 

            If I had a fight with a friend at school, I came home fuming.  I’d steal the computer at the first opportunity to write.  At the time I didn’t realize it, but writing was my way of coping.  Once I had words to hypothetical paper, my anger was gone and I could sleep peacefully.  The next day, I could blow off whatever had been bothering me yesterday and move on with my life.

 

            My first three years of high school were abysmal, grade-wise.  I flunked chemistry and algebra twice.  The only classes I excelled in were art and English.  Those required no effort on my part, and even on the rare occasion they did, I was eager to complete the assignment.  But even in my senior year, when I buckled down and studied, I flunked chemistry in the second semester.  I suppose you could say math-related classes were not my strong suit.

 

            When college came around, I couldn’t afford the liberal arts college I desired.  So I settled for the community college, for the time being, and signed up for the basics—Algebra, English 101, and Creative Writing.

 

            English 101 turned out to be amazing.

 

            My first day I sat in the front row, nervous for my first college class to start.  I watched students filter in.  Then the teacher appeared.  Who else could he be?  He was older, at least in his fifties, and carried a simple briefcase.  His smile was infectious, and when he spoke, I located a distinct German accent.  He introduced himself as Professor Richter.

 

            “You are the envy of the English 101 classes,” he said proudly.  “In my class, we don’t write essays and theses.  But do you know what we are going to write?”  He placed his palms flat on his desk, leaning over, his eyes glittering behind his thick, round glasses.  “We’re going to write a mystery.”

 

            I immediately perked up.  To me, this was like taking Creative Writing twice.  Yes, I had a restriction—mystery only, and the four side papers had to relate to crime scenes and the like—but it was the kind of assignment I had always begged my high school teachers to let us do.  Only one had agreed and let us write a sci-fi story.  This professor was placing such a wondrous gift in my lap.  Write a story—and earn a grade while doing it.

 

            And I jumped on it.  I wrote a story about four teenagers who went on a camping trip.  The girl woke up in the crashed van deep in the mountains.  Her brakes had been cut.  She had to look over the unconscious passengers—her boyfriend, her sister, and her sister’s best friend—and try to figure out who had done it and why.

 

            I had a penchant for denying the reader a happy ending.  The culprit was the depressed boyfriend, who had decided to take them all with him when he died.  The story ended with him closing in on the narrator, determined to see his plan through to the end.

 

            We had four side assignments to help us add depth to the original story.  The second was to describe a crime.  I had decided to make the four sides into side stories to the original, so I couldn’t rewrite the cutting of the brakes.  Instead, I took an alternate route down a grayer path.  I wrote about the boyfriend in a mental hospital after his repeated attempted suicide.

 

            During class, we had the opportunity to go over the assignments with Professor Richter.  As always, I was eager for feedback from someone more experienced.  When my turn came at last, he sat next to me and passed my paper over.

 

            “Your story doesn’t fit the requirements,” he told me seriously.

 

            I felt a pang of disappointment, but tried to hide it.  “Why’s that?”

 

            “This assignment needs to be about a crime,” he said gently.  “A crime happening right now.  You mentioned the crime, but only in passing.”

 

            That was easy enough to understand.  “So in order for this to work, I’d have to describe the suicide attempt,” I said slowly.

 

            Professor Richter shifted, an uneasy look settling into his usually warm features.  “Yes.”  Then he smiled.  “But you don’t have to.  I know I couldn’t.”

 

            I returned the smile.  After all, I was confident in my abilities.  Since the first story I had put to paper, I’d been writing every day of my life.  By high school I was churning out short stories and chapters furiously; I could write a 37-chapter novel in one year, even with a six-month hiatus.  Normally, I’d have something new on my old online account every other day.  Twenty-five stories a year was nothing to me—and I never just wrote one thing.  Humor, horror, fantasy, romance, smut . . . if I thought of it and the idea stuck, I happily jotted it down.

 

            “I can do it,” I told him brightly.

 

            He gave me a slightly unsettled look that I didn’t really notice until later.  Maybe that was because he smiled right afterward and moved on to the next student.  Perhaps it was due to the fact he was always so upbeat and cheerful.  He had a severe case of diabetes, to the point he had to bring everything to class, plus a few snacks.  He informed us of his condition in order to explain why he could have fresh apples and snacks in class, but we were not permitted more than a bottled drink.

 

            I rewrote my paper, adding the attempted suicide before the scene at the hospital.  At the end, a girl the boy came to know in the hospital got out, and a few weeks later was found dead of a successful suicide.  Satisfied with my work, I turned it in that weekend.

 

            Monday I came to class, but the teacher never showed.  There was no notice of a class cancellation on the door, so we were all puzzled.  A few kids in the back said something about permission to leave if the teacher doesn’t show up in half an hour.

 

            Nearly that half hour later, someone arrived.  But it wasn’t Professor Richter.

 

            It was a man and a woman, neither of whom I had ever seen before.  They told us to settle down.  The room quieted as we waited to hear the news, hoping for something a hospitalization at worse.

 

            “Professor Richter has gone missing,” said the man.

 

            I couldn’t move or speak for minutes after that.  My surroundings suddenly seemed fake, almost plastic around me.  I caught bits and pieces of what was going on.  Professor Richter had been grading our papers.  In the midst of that, he decided to take a walk.  He left, but didn’t take either his dog or his emergency equipment.  He never returned.

 

            The officials suspected a kidnapping, due to the coincidental disappearance of a truck on the same route he normally took a walk on.  There were more details, but I can’t remember them.  I do remember that as the class began to leave, I felt something snap inside me.  I hunched down in my chair, my chin to my knees, and began to sob hysterically.  The woman who sat next to me hugged me, tried to soothe me and tell me to take deep breaths.  The man and woman who had delivered the terrible news also remained behind to comfort me.

 

            My peer said, “I know, honey.  It’s frightening because no one knows what happened.  But it will work out for the best.  Breathe, now.”

 

            I heard they replaced him with a substitute teacher, but I never went back to the class.  I worked on the final paper during the time I should have been there.  Due to a mix-up, I never got the paper in on time, but by then I no longer cared.

 

            Just after the quarter had ended, right before winter break began, my mother walked by my room.  I was working on a story when she called my name.  I swiveled in my chair to look at her.

 

            She gave me an expression that, later, I would realize she had no idea I hadn’t already heard the news.  She said, “I just heard they found your professor last week.  He killed himself.”

 

            I can only imagine how I looked.  I might have tried to say something, but all I remember is burying my face in my hands and screaming.  Suddenly my family was all there with me; my father, mother, and younger sister.  I clung to my dad and cried, babbling nonsense about how I didn’t know, how did this happen, why?  Professor Richter had been such a good man, a happy person with an infectious personality.  How could he kill himself?

 

            My world completely crumbled beneath my feet.  I had no will to write.  Anything I had been working on seemed dead and lifeless now.

 

            And the more I thought about it, the more I realized the coincidences were too much.  Especially once I learned how he had died—stabbing himself multiple times, and then contracting hypothermia and dying from it.

 

            I had ignored his quiet plea to write a different crime scene.  I had written, in graphic detail, about how the boy had been feeling when he sliced his arm from elbow to wrist, how the only reason he hadn’t died had been because his mother had walked in on him doing it.  I turned the paper in.  Then that weekend, while grading my class’s papers, Professor Richter disappeared.

 

            And he killed himself.  He used a knife, like my character.  Unlike my character, he went outside, found an abandoned barn, and made sure no one could save him.  Taking a lesson from fiction, as it were.

 

            No one ever pointed a finger but me.  Yet the coincidences are too much to bear.  I couldn’t have been the cause—I’d only known him a couple months, and a real suicide builds up over time—but had I metaphorically pulled the trigger?  Had I been the final nudge to convince him that, yes, death was better than whatever he was suffering at the time?  Were I any closer to his family at the time, could I be convicted of a crime in assisting his suicide?

 

            Intellectually, it’s not my fault.

            Emotionally, it’s terrifying to realize I could have been the nudge . . . and perhaps, if I hadn’t already, I could be much more in a much worse situation.

Author's Note

This is my first work of non-fiction here. Help in all aspects is doubly appreciated, since I'm not familiar with this kind of writing.

Reviews

[Fabian G. Franklin]

I read the entire story and it kept my attention throughout. I found no typos and no areas of distress gramatically speaking. That is more than I can say for most. Good work.

[Chris Zahar]

Writerscafe is a very supportive site, where people, even if they don't like your work, will give you at least a thumbs up. Well, I've been guilty of that on many occasions, so I hope you believe me when I tell you that, YOU ARE AN EXTREMELY TALENTED, PROFESSIONAL WRITER.

You certainly take your time getting to the meat of the story - i.e, the professor's disappearance, yet, somehow, you managed to keep my attention throughout. Perhaps it was just the fact that I related to you in some respects (I too absolutely hate math, and couldn't do any of the hard sciences to save my life, but writing an art were always a breeze to me), or perhaps because you brought up nasty memories that I couldn't relate to (I absolutely hated my Creative Writing class because all of the most applauded work sounded like something off of "My So-Called Life", and my work was virtually ignored), but, nonetheless, you kept my attention throughout.

As far as the torment you go through in this piece, I think there is very little reason for you to believe that you were responsible for his death. Firstly, the two deaths don't sound nearly as similar as you make them. There is a huge difference between stabbing yourself to death and cutting your wrists. True, they both involve sharp objects and piercing the skin, but so does impaling, so, for all you know, his suicide could've been inspired by reading a biography on Vlad Dracula. And also, as you mentioned, he went outside into a barn. Second, stabbing yourself many times is an extremely unusual form of suicide. That actually makes me wonder whether he did commit suicide. I mean, who stabs themselves to death? If you ask me, I think this sounds a hell of a lot more like homicide. Think about. A perfectly happy man who stabs HIMSELF to death? Stabs himself? Isn't that kind of like beating yourself to death with a baseball bat? If this really did happen, I'd like to see the police reopen the books on this and reconsider whatever evidence they had to prove that this was suicide.

[Nykkiicia Cion]

this really happened?