Content Warning: This piece contains references to suicide and self harm.
‘Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again’: John 3:3
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He told me his first sin was eating his brother in the womb, a preternatural, pre-consciousness display of greed that doomed him before he was even born. He said that when he was baptised, the minister cut his finger on a rough chip in the stone basin, infecting the water, robbing him of the chance to redeem him from the sin of in-utero consumption. He confessed, finally, that he felt his brother groan and writhe inside him sometimes, like how a mother feels the first kicks, that he’d been kicking his whole life. At twelve, he shoved so hard that it made him throw up blood, and the school had to send him home early.
His scheme was that if he had been baptised properly, his brother would have been able to move on into heaven, but instead, he ended up some psychological rendition of Saturn devouring his Son. Once, I asked why he couldn’t just get baptised again, to which he typed ‘haha’. In his early adult years, he wanted to drown away his brother, hoping that if he were drunk enough, the fists and jabs wouldn’t have the strength to hurt so badly, but instead they only made him sick quicker. He told me a story of an ambulance ride from an ice rink, a broken ankle, a concussion and a lifetime ban from the premises, but he only felt something real when his paramedic asked him if he had any siblings.
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He never asked me if I had any siblings, though I don’t know if I’d have been honest with him if he had. He knew I was younger, and I knew he was older; we didn’t discuss the specifics. I knew he also lived somewhere in Central America based on when he was active, but The Forum had rules about how much you could share—no real names or locations. I took to imagining him as a blue-collar southern man with deep religious values, apropos to his baptism story. The idea that he spoke with a country drawl and enjoyed barbequing meat endeared me to him in a familial way, maybe some unconscious cheap shot at nostalgia, and it distracted me from the thought of spending my time talking about death with strange old men online, the cliche predatory concept of becoming another woman killed because of an excess of digital trust lingering passively. Anonymity let me imagine them as my peers.
I wasn’t on The Forum for quite the same reasons as him; I didn’t necessarily want to die. Of course, I had my own vices, a crippling anxiety that crept up along each vertebra of my spine the second I felt like I was being watched – but I didn’t want to die. It all intrigued me, a performance of people praying for redemption, a techno-Commedia dell’Arte where Perriot’s mask was an anime girl icon. Sometimes you’d notice a regular patron disappearing, and you’d tell yourself that they’d gotten the help they needed, but underneath, we knew that it was more likely that they were dead, or forever stuck somewhere in between the two. It was probably selfish of me not to dissuade them from their attempts, but if they were here, then it wasn’t worth the effort; we were all heading to atrophy in the end. He was the only one I ever really talked to, not for any reason beyond chance. He wasn’t remarkable, another pusillanimous adrenaline junkie with a theory of being fixed by some biblical intervention, a milquetoast man afraid of communicating his depression, so he justified it with a mission.
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We first started talking after he proposed his glorious idea: to die for exactly seven minutes. He held the conviction that this would erase his brother once and for all. He had posted asking for suggestions on what methods would ensure him this exact duration, and I was intrigued to see the idea in action. Although I had little to offer in terms of scientific or medical support, I responded to his post, expressing my curiosity about his project. We started messaging later that night.
Cigarette butts littered the outside of the front door like a witch's sacred salt circle, protecting us from malignancy. Though I am not superstitious, something felt blasphemous about throwing up inside the warehouse. My anxiously triggered nausea comes on in sharp waves, signalled to those around me by the onset of a sallow silence and a haphazard finger rubbing against my upper lip, some compulsion to delay the regurgitation. I always managed to run outside before the wave broke.
It wasn't uncommon for James to find me in this position, crouched down, warped palm against the metal wall, face somewhere between nausea-white and post-sickness-tears-red. He handed me a bottle of water, warm. Everything in this town was always warm. We stayed in silence till I was satisfied I was done with leaving my regurgitated biological mark on the concrete, at least for today.
“Have you ever tried taking those anti-stomach-acid-whatever pills they got at the drug store?” He’d ask me, to which I’d deliver a wry look. Whatever was wrong with me probably wasn’t as treatable as a stomach acid issue. I appreciated his attempt at a solution, though; there wasn’t, admittedly, much more he could do to help than that.
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He’d offer me a warm hand to help me up, a disappointing reminder that we needed to return to work. In a gross way, these regular moments of intimacy meant a lot to me. Throwing up in front of someone is an exposing experience; the humiliation of it is almost erotic. We shuffled back into the warehouse in quiet content, our private time for the day complete. Entering the warehouse was a multi-step sensory experience that started with the sound, a droning, buzzing choir of mechanics. The smell dripped down the back of your throat into a taste, acerbic like blood. Whatever you saw was the least interesting part of the puzzle: constant alloy sheets and corrugated iron. When you reached touch, it meant you were working again.
The pay was not good, and we got no implications that it was getting any better either. It was the kind of job you had because you had nothing else. Half the staff were ex-prisoners, a metal box stewing with systematic rage, grease and exhaustion. I ended up here by mistake, the result of a morose hand injury that left me incapable of working the waitress jobs all the other girls my age ended up in. The visuals of it were more offensive than the wound itself, but its dramatic conception had an apparent effect on the appetite of customers, and I was quietly let go soon afterwards.
I took the response to it as a social admonishment and restricted my human contact to only the requirements, turning to the internet for safekeeping. Forums of similarly disfigured and depressed individuals became a solace, a haven for social antipaths, which is how I ended up in The Forum. It had a name, at some point, but its gourmless nature meant any real title was inapt to describe it accurately. It just became The Forum. I have the impression that it started as an inchoate fetish site, someone’s fantasy of extreme asphyxiation going too far, leading to a discovered interest in toeing the line of death.
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Most nights, I messaged him, discussing his mission, amongst other things. It was demeaning to admit he was probably my closest friend, aside from James, but there was little in my life to have pride in, so it was less bothersome than it should have been. He found my curiosity and care flattering, and I found myself entertained in the same way one is at an illegal greyhound race; a little guilty at its immorality but sticking around in case your investment pays off anyway. I did, earnestly, want to see him free from the weight of his brother, in whatever form that took.
He kept me updated on his research on the matter. One week, a plan to siphon a methodically precalculated amount of blood from his body just long enough to stop the heart before restoring it, the next a specific concoction of pills that would allegedly cause heart failure, though their accuracy was less precise. I never knew enough about the science behind them to confirm or deny if they’d work; I just became an outlet for him to express each idea. I wondered if he had a wife or children, if they knew what he was planning. I imagined if I were his daughter, I’d be sitting with him in a garage filled with decommissioned medical gear, flipping through old textbooks filled with records of those revived from death, making notes on their exact circumstances. I speculated on whether he talked about his idea with anyone offline at all, if he subjected cashiers to maddened monologues or delved into drunken declarations at dive bars under the influence of a few too many beers to be appropriate on a Wednesday afternoon.
If he had asked me to help, I’d probably have said yes. If he had given me an address, asked me to drive hours away from my home, I’d have gone. I wouldn’t have told anyone that I’d left; it would have taken at least a week before James was concerned enough by my truancy to call. The rest of the mechanics would have hardly noticed my absence if I’d died in my room one evening and never shown up again. Someone with more self-regard would have worried about becoming an accomplice or even perpetrator, would have felt guilt for any degree of involvement with it. I
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didn’t worry about what would happen if he died permanently. The suicide of a middle-aged alcoholic wouldn’t prompt enough concern to look too deeply. There was no real connection between us; I didn’t even know his name. He was just a collection of randomly generated letters and numbers assigned to a profile, along with a low-quality picture of a tree. Perhaps it was too literal a way to look at the situation, but it allowed me to sleep at night. If I took it too seriously, it made me maudlin, which ‘affected my workplace morale’.
We would text steadily for three months before he decided to try for the first time. He sent me a coltish list of supplies he’d ordered from a deep-web black market, some cheap Silk Road subshoot. It was mostly chemical names to me; I liked to think I recognised at least one from high school science. He explained that if he were isolated in an airtight, confined space with the fumes of his concoction for long enough, it should shut down his system. Aided by an air purifier set to a delayed timer, the fumes would be cleared, and he should reawaken. It sounded impractical to me, too many assumptions being made, but I stayed complacent and asked him to keep me updated on how things went.
I didn’t hear from him for the next four days.
Since the sudden conception of my hand-wound, I’d regularly make the journey to a millennial heavy, ‘all-natural’ handmade homewares store about two hours out of town, with the sole intention of buying a small tube of basil hand cream. I wouldn’t consider myself insecure about the wound anymore, but it was bothersome and in the heat dried out uncomfortably. The woman at the counter of the store, the same sickly-pale waifish girl every time, had developed some kind of sympathetic affection for me and always let me know when they had restocked the cream. She
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excitedly told me every time I came that it was made by a silent Buddhist hermit up in Alaska, which seemed a bit excessive, but I appreciated her passion and salesmanship skills anyway. If I were lucky, she'd treat me to a short presentation on her handmade aphrodisiac gummy bears, of which I was currently in possession of three untouched bags. She had a way with her words, and I didn't want to disappoint her unwarranted liking of me. I always applied the cream in the same way, one small dot of it on the back of my left hand, then five rotations with my right to migrate it into the skin.
While I was sitting in my driver's seat, across the highway from the homeware store, at the turn of the fifth hand rotation, I felt a prepossession to pull out my phone. Some minor temperature change, indicating that something was active within its small digital constraints. I had received a new message from him – phone number details. I had, of course, assumed he wasn’t dead. Somehow, I believe that he would have made sure The Forum knew he was properly dead if that did happen. I was surprised, though, by the sharing of digits; what had happened to no personal details? He was always a stickler for the rules. Regardless of my worry, I sent the number a simple ‘hi’. It’d have been rude not to.
He was quick to get back to me. ‘It didn’t work’ – I had inferred. ‘I am in the hospital, will try again when they let me out.’ Typing. ‘ I am less afraid now.’ Pause. Typing. Then, finally, ‘I will tell u more soon.’
As if he were taunting my intrigue, he became irregular, rarely posting on The Forum and messaging me even less. It was difficult for me to get him to expand upon his newfound bravery, but it inspired a new degree of determination towards something; it was unclear if he was after the same goal or a new warped vision of it, and I wanted more than anything to understand it.
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His ambiguity annoyed me. After months of his confidence in me, I had felt like a worthy recipient of the darkest thoughts he had. What good was I to him if I wasn’t a dedicated and unbiased witness? I struggled with the disconnection; his words were more vague, senile, almost antediluvian in nature. It felt like an anticipation more than a disregard. His sudden distance only made me want to talk to him more; the absence of something so mundane yet routine opened a vacuum in my life. What did he mean when he said he was not afraid anymore?
On an evening of drunken decline, my hand dried into a stiffness that made it uncomfortable to type, and I made a misclick and called him. My first thought was not to hang up; instead, a banal irritation at how small phone screens were. By the time the thought to disconnect occurred to me, he had answered. Instantly, I hung up. This was a line I wasn’t interested in crossing. Voices were not anonymous; if he could speak, then he was real, which meant I was real. Some philosopher probably explained this better than I did decades ago, a testament to modern unoriginality. I hurriedly shot off a ‘Sorry, accident’ then shut my phone, dropping it into bed. My hand cream wasn’t in my room, and my hand ached. It was later than I wanted it to be, touching my plastic glass made me feel cheap, and the alcohol made me heady. My phone gave a smothered buzz into the quilt, and it ricocheted around my skull like the hum of a jigsaw blade, vibrating into my teeth. I didn’t have the self-discipline to delay the satisfaction of my curiosity for more than a moment, though, and rapidly went to look at his message.
‘Call me again. U dont need to speak. Want to show u something.’
The call notice filled the screen, and I dutifully accepted. My phone screen was dark for a moment before a man filled the frame. He was wide-set and greyish, with a dreadful beard that I felt a phantom of scratching over my hand. He didn’t say anything, staring directly at the lens.
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An arm moved out of sight off camera; I could hear it crackling and rustling amidst the auditory dust. A dull metal barrel rose from the bottom of the screen towards his face, parting the coarse hairs with little resistance.
The camera lagged for a second, so I heard the sound before I saw it. Ultimately, I didn’t see much anyway. From off camera, I could hear a crackling, wet gurgling; on screen, I could only see a pathetic drizzle of smoke rising over the dim room. I hung up.
James asked me what happened to my hand the first time we met. It was still fresh at that point, and people were afraid to talk about it for fear of offending me. It was the slimy, untouched elephant in the room. I fantasised about moving somewhere cold, where wearing gloves wouldn’t draw just as much attention. His bluntness was calming, and for some reason, I decided I did want to tell him.
“I put my hand into a deep fryer,” I said to him, standing out back of the mechanics. He was in the process of lighting a crumpled cigarette— a Marlboro Gold.
“Why’d you do that?” he muttered from around the filter.
“I don’t really know. I just felt like it.”
He exhaled and offered me the cigarette. I took it with my mangled hand, brushing softly against his calloused one. His skin was warm.
“Did it feel good?”
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I stared at him. No one had asked me that. “Yeah. It really did.”
Fin.
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