WOLF WALKER WOKE. HE had been dreaming that Jewel was singing. The song was “Après un Rêve” by Fauré, and the particular passage his sleep had snagged on was the repetition of the word reviens, reviens. The note was middle C.
That was how I was going to begin this. But I don’t think I can tell what happened at the Suicide Academy in that elegiac tone. What I need is the guts to tell it strong—and where an elegy seems to be called for I won’t merely be elegiac: I’ll weep. For myself, for Jewel, for mad Max Cardillo—even for that son-of-a-bitch Gilliatt.
On that day the events of which I’m concerned with I—Wolf Walker—did wake hearing the Fauré song just as it had sounded when Jewel and I were married and I’d accompany her faint, sweet vocalizations with my crippled chords. But I refused to allow myself any “reviens” type of self-indulgence. I dressed quickly and prepared for the day.
I was in a bitter mood. As bitter as the cold that lay like a dead hand on the sloping white lawn outside my window. The white was snow—the first snow of the new year: January 2. The day’s roster would be light. New Year’s Day is always murder and this one had been no exception: one of the best depression days. Hangovers, blues and a false sense of clarity—a kind of despairing 20/20 vision that seems to see down to the end of time and beyond.
Eighty-two people. What a mess! The Academy was set up for a maximum of fifty. Others have a larger capacity—the one in California, for example, which I visited when I was in training, could handle eight hundred a day. But I wouldn’t want to be Director of that one. I took the job to get away from the world, not to run a whole world of my own.
But this is no allegorical crap about how the Suicide Academy is really a microcosm. Don’t let them kid you. It’s just a place where people come when they want out of everything for good. They get one day—one rather ingeniously planned day, if you’ll pardon the modesty, since as the Director I’m one of the planners. (In fact I’m such a goddamned great planner that on this icy, ass-freezing day after New Year’s Day part of me was freezing up inside because of the trouble one of my plans was getting me into.)
Anyway, they get one day to decide, no more. I’ve had them clinging to me, whining, begging, bribing—anything to get a little more time. Of course that kind usually goes back and lives. Very insincere type.