Songs
Suicide Song
Entry One
By W. Hartzenberg
Chancery Publishing House © 2014
Electronic Book Edition
Hello My Friend
Afterword
About the Author
About the Publisher
Suicide Song
~ * ~
"Hallo my Friend, Hallo . . ." -- Neil Diamond.
The night is hot, as are most nights in these parts. Hot, humid and dark, real dark, what most people call pitch-black. Only it wasn't. Pitch has shades to it; this darkness lacks that much, it's pock-mark stars, tiny dots far flung, gave no depth to the dark.
Not a ripple of velvet sheen in this dark; it never impresses the onlooker that a person might get lost in its depths; this dark is cold and hard. Were it not for the few specks of stars it would have appeared flat and so black that one might imagine it reflective.
This is not a far-fetched idea, at least not for those in the know. For not far from this very room lies a cave and in its winding depths and myriad caverns is a lake and from it, water flows into fissures and courses unknown. The source of these subterranean watercourses is so dark and deep that when the beam of a flashlight hits its surface, it reflects the light upward at odd angles. It is the sheer depth of the water that causes this fractal phenomenon.
A couple years prior to today a team of archaeologists decided that the flooded underground tunnels there should be explored and mapped. Equipped with wet suits and trained to deep-sea dive, two dove into the freezing, black water, never to be seen alive again. A few months later a colleague found one of the bodies snagged on a sediment bar near the surface within the watery labyrinth. Speculation held that the pair of divers were trapped in a choke tunnel and were unable to make it back to the surface. The circumstances of their deaths, no one can know for sure. Where the second body might be remains a mystery. The one found was discovered only because stray light reflected against his wetsuit, sent adrift through the hidden channels, it finally snagged in a shallow. The cave and the mysterious lake reflected light in death. In death, mind you, not life, never in life. No, at this threshold, light is turned away and death's calm, hard cold quaffs all into a belly of unlife.
That was then and there, two years ago in the Womburu Caverns. And its memory is what the night sky tonight looked like, felt like, a light reflecting blackness unexplored, dangerous and deadly, unlife. Here and now I stand at my window looking at the sky, I feel tempted to test my theory, to go and fetch my flashlight and aim it at the night sky. I don’t. I'm not sure why but I think that I prefer the mystery to certainty. Certitude is an illusion. I shift my weight some and change the angle of my view. My angle might have changed, looking at another slice of sky, but my view is the same. All I see is a colorless sky reflecting no light, choking flecks of stars, no life I can reach.
The heavens are beautiful for all the light they lack. The hard surface seems, a sight to behold, only inches from my fingertips. I am small. Splendor is like that, at times, soft and generous, and at other times magnificence lies juxtaposed to hard planes and tiny cracked imperfections. Beauty is like that, fickle.
The humidity is intense. One of those days you take a shower and find the sweat beading on your brow even as you feel the water cascade over your crown. Once more I shift my weight, a futile attempt to position myself in the path of a breeze none-existing. Had I been thinking of this heat when I planned this event I would have not stowed the fan with everything else in the room. I'd have had it out and blowing, if even hot air, to ease the sweat now running down my chest. Breathing in this much humidity is work. Drawing breath felt more like fighting an invisible wall than a natural, unconscious act. Then again nothing, when you get down to it, is unconscious. Filling your lungs in this heat not a mere survival reflex governed by the so-called primitive brain. It is an action, hence a choice, just as unlife.
As I stand at my window contemplating my next breath I realize that this, the humid air and swallowing black tableau of sky and unlife are all in their own ways, separate and together, things of beauty. Serendipity made this night, not me. I'm convinced I only added one element, as you might salt a bowl of noodles, the seasoning, not the substance. Tonight is the last I am forced to be almost preternaturally aware of everything; nature forced her hand to include in my awareness, my choice, and my pain the act of breathing. Beauty . . . a hard mistress indeed.
I turn around and the words reproduced through the mp3 player catch my attention: We've been through it all and you love me all the same. Fate? Hardly. Providence plays no role in this song playing in this room at this hour. I find myself glad for the player's repeat feature. Thanks to it, the song will carry me into oblivion, past breezes and illusions, beyond futile work, beyond the labor of breath.
Earlier this evening, the third-year law student swallowed a bottle of painkillers with a quarter bottle of fine Irish whiskey.
The whiskey sent the pills down easy, ensuring ultimate success, unlife. Writing a note required effort, futile, senseless work. There'd be no work tonight and hardly any when they found him. The gap between this window and the stripped down base of what was his bed a few hours ago is closed in three languid steps. And on the last step, the motion to pick up the razor he left on the bedsprings is one of grace testifying of the athleticism of a young man, only "just a kid" to those in their twilight years. The blood ran like streams in the Womburu, dark.
Among his last acts had been to lie down on naked coils, his life draining through the steel running down onto carefully laid plastic garbage bags below. We found the dorm room immaculate. Not a thing out of place and not a speck of dust to be found on any of the cheap, mostly white surfaces. No personal effects, as a matter of fact, the only things left in the room were the mp3 player, black garbage bags rolled out under, and with a wide margin surrounding, the bed and the razor.
My first cut was done lying flat on the bed coils. My cuts, nothing so trite and begging as athwart the wrists, but I began from the palm and ended upwards the elbow, careful to take that thin, blue road. The painkillers must really be something; no evidence I flinched or hesitated. The second cut is wavy, slipping up my forearm like lazy script, probably for the blood. I'd been taking aspirin for three days, several pills a day to ensure my blood ran thin for the occasion, the alcohol was added, sweet assurance no clotting occurred and I bled out quickly.
The wondrous thing about living far away from the city is that the night sky here is a million dollar view. As he lay on his bed he turns his head some, watching that dark, dark sky with the small glistening stars, listening to Neill Diamond croon--Hallo Again, I think; I know it’s late, and I couldn't wait. Hallo my friend, hallo.
~ * ~
Afterword
Suicide Song, though fiction, is inspired by actual events. Henry was nineteen years of age. Most of what I know about the incident, I learned from Henry's girlfriend, Gina. We shared a dormitory. Henry wasn't failing University. His family suffered no known financial troubles. Gina was not pregnant and the couple had no issues. Henry planned his demise. The song Hello My Friend, Hello, played on repeat when his body was discovered. Music, then, wasn't always easy to get. Henry had taken deliberate measures to obtain his suicide song.
I knew Henry, met him one day in the cafeteria. We talked over lunch of our mutual fascination with Womburu and its underground lake. The news of his death harkened back to that conversation as I struggled to comprehend his decision to end his own life.
None of us ever learned, ever understood why Henry took his own life, but the care he took and diligence in the act spoke volumes of his mindset.
It was a few months after that conversation, he and Gina began see
ing each other seriously. In the aftermath, Gina suffered night terrors of such ferocity that they shook our dorm. Her screams in the dead of night shivered through us reaching down to our cores. Two weeks of this ended in what we suspect was Gina's own suicide.
Before my twenty-second year, I had stood before twelve gravesites of friends: friends gone forever because they ended their own lives. Suicide Song is for those friends to whom I could not properly say goodbye. It is written in tears and loss and ache and wonder. You will never be replaced, you were unique; the world is now forced to somehow do without you. What you were to do, what you would contribute to this world will go undone. Undone is the cost of unlife. Suicide Song is the note you could not leave, Henry, perhaps for fear of being, again, misunderstood, or perhaps because isolation convinced you of a note's futility. All I really know in the wake of your sudden and complete absence is; I understand even less than you do.
About the Author
Wanda Hartzenberg
Ms. Hartzenberg hails the youngest of five children from a family of passionate overachievers. Growing up in Petoria, South Africa, her education was completed at Potchefstoom studying communications. She is an independent career woman, enjoying in her free time catch-release fly fishing and hiking. Her interest in writing began early. At four years of age, she crafted her first story and has been enthralled with the power of a good story since. Today, she writes literary fiction and operates an online platform for independent writers and authors. Ms. Hartzenberg plans to continue writing professionally.
About the Publisher
Chancery Publishing House is a division of Authors Allies Literary Group. AALG houses four imprints. Ariel Media and Geneva Press are dedicated to genres in the young adult new adult categories. Monaco Books handles adult fiction of most genres, while Chancery Publishing House deals in literary fiction across the genre spectrum. If you are a writer looking for a publisher, consider a visit to our website. https://www.authorsallies.com