Killing Myself Has 

Changed My Life

Killing Myself Has Changed My Life

by Tom Barlow

It has been almost a year since I killed myself. I've been through some tough times since then, as you might expect, but I'm feeling much better now. Hopeful.

I first met Elaine at a resort in Idaho that our government operates for those of us who need a secure place to blow off steam. I was unwinding from negotiating a treaty with a Liberian company that claimed to own clear title to Saturn's outermost moon, Pan. The bank they'd built there had quickly become the money-laundering capital of the entire solar system.

After two days of meditation and meals of organic sawdust and leaves, I'd taken to spending most of my time in the bar. The alcohol made short work of the knots in my back, and I was relaxed and ready for companionship by the time she walked in, between my fourth and fifth drink, or maybe it was the fifth and sixth.

Elaine could have been beautiful, in the same way any decent chunk of marble could become the Pieta. Her severe haircut and baggy jumpsuit concealed her potential, but I was taken by the graceful way she moved. Being no Adonis myself, I kept my eye on her as she crossed the room. 

She took a desultory route to an empty table in the back, well removed from the rest of us. Before the waiter could reach her, though, she moved a table closer. A minute later, she moved up another table. I felt like I was watching the tide come in.

Having been lonely most of my life, I've always been drawn to women that appear adrift. "Would you care to join me for a drink?" I asked when she reached the table next to mine.

She seemed taken aback. "Me?"

I shoved an empty chair toward her with my foot. "Just until your friends show up? I'm Stu, by the way."

She nodded and sat down, stiffly, as though facing a court-martial.

"I'm harmless," I assured her. "What would you like to drink?"

"Alcohol?"

"Yes, alcohol. What's your pleasure?"

"Alcohol. I'm sorry, but I don't know anything about alcoholic drinks."

"You're in luck. I happen to be an expert. Let me order you something to help you relax."

I ordered her a Mai-Tai, a good beginner's drink, sweet and fruity. I was hoping the little umbrella the bartender put in them might bring a smile to her face.

Since she wouldn't meet my eyes, I felt free to look her over more closely. She was young, skin still unwrinkled, earlobe uncreased. She had no worry lines around her eyes yet, but the tension in her posture suggested she was working on them.

 "Your name is Elaine?" I said, reading her name tag.

She nodded. "That's correct. I saw you in our hathayoga class. You are quite clumsy."

I remembered her from the class, in the front row. She was limber as a statue. 

"You don't have a lot of room to talk," I said as the waiter brought her drink. "You should see me with the Kama Sutra, though. I'm like a snake crawling through a pretzel when you add sex to the picture."

You might expect a diplomat would have learned to bite back such sophomoric comments. Maybe it was my sixth or seventh drink.

Before I could apologize, she said, "I'd like to see that." Her eyes were fixed on the candle stuck in the Chianti bottle on our table. She took only tiny sips of the Mai Tai, but she took them every five seconds. "Could you show me now?"

We took our refills up to my room. It might have been my ninth or tenth drink.

I was, frankly, in shock. I'd never had much success with the ladies. They often thought me amusing, but that never seemed to translate into lust.

I tried to carry on a conversation with her on the way to my suite, but it was like trying to bounce eggs off the floor. She walked impatiently ahead of me, which was awkward, since she didn't know where my room was.

"I get the feeling you're on a mission," I said in the elevator. "Are you doing this on a dare? A pledge prank? Did somebody piss you off?" I had a bad habit of challenging women about their motivation, on the way to the bedroom.

"I'm sorry," she said. "In my last performance review I was told I lacked understanding of human behavior. My sister thinks it's because I've never had sex. That's why I'm asking for your help. Are you willing to help me?"

I told her that made me feel cheap, but not in a bad way. "Educational sex," I said, "is better than no sex at all."

I knew better, but it seemed like the right thing to say at the time.

Initially, she was detached, inspecting each of my body parts as they were unveiled. She began to soften up, though, as I gave her a long, slow back rub.

After that, one thing led to another in conventional order, with pauses for instructions. She knew very little about what went where, or in what sequence, but was a fast learner. Through trial, error, and perseverance, we finally got our arms and legs and lips and other parts in the right juxtaposition. Good things followed.

She may not have been a conversationalist, but she was sure a moaner. She started the moment my tongue found her ear, and didn't quit until I surrendered a few hours and a few bouts later.

"Enough. No mas. I give up," I said.

"Already? Surely, one more time?" Her complexion was better now, rosy. I liked her hair better disheveled. She was musky.

I rolled over to look at the clock. "It's morning. Class dismissed. We're scheduled for t'ai chi chuan in fifteen minutes."

She grabbed the sheets on either side of me and pulled me toward her. "No. Let's screw some more."

I tugged back. "No, please. Stu is wrung dry. Stu is hung over. You now know everything Stu can teach you about sex." And then some, I thought to myself.

She frowned. "Is this normal? Only a few hours and we're finished already?"

"No, normal is a few minutes. A few hours is a master class, and I'm not eighteen any more. You were terrific, by the way, especially for your first time."

"And second, and third, and fourth."

"So how was I?"

"The third time was the best. The first was disappointing, the second was better but the position seemed awkward, and your rigidity was questionable on the fourth."

I waited for the punch line, but there wasn't any. "So what was my overall score?"

She didn't crack a smile.

I rolled over onto my elbow to look her in the face. "You're an odd one," I said. "What's your story?"

"It's classified."

"As in top secret? I'm a diplomat. An important one, if that means anything, which it doesn’t. I'm probably authorized to know your secret."

She ignored my comment. "Ready to screw again yet?"

"Breakfast."

She shook her head. "I only have a little longer. Let's screw again."

 I finally had to escape into the shower. When I came back, she was gone.

#

I didn't see her during the rest of the retreat, but wasn't surprised; people seemed to come and go regularly. However, I found that many of the remaining guests reminded me of her, they way they sat by themselves in the bar, staring at the candle on their table.

"A convention of shy people," the bartender guessed. "This must be their mixer."

#

Once back at work, circumstances drove the retreat experience out of my mind. The Panistas hadn't even waited until my vacation was over before violating the treaty, and our government was considering the military option.

I was in their part of the world, trying to reopen negotiations, when their agents blew up our home office in D.C. My uncle, a diplomat himself, called from his embassy on the other side of the world to see if I was still alive.

"Thank God," he said when I answered.

I was in a fog. "Who? What?"

He told me that the blast had killed all of our senior staff, right up to and including the director, all of his assistants, and most of the appointees.

I was still numb a couple of days later when I was summoned to the office of the man the President had appointed to rebuild the diplomatic corps. I didn't know what to expect: termination, promotion. In the chaos of the moment, anything seemed possible.

The new director was actually the old director. The old, old director. He'd been booted several times because of his thorny personality, and brought back each time for his incomparable understanding of diplomacy.

Our military had already decimated the people responsible for the bombing, but there were a dozen other hot spots in the system that needed our immediate attention.

I was shown into the director's office. He sat in the middle of the room in a tall wooden chair. The top of the chair was scalloped into the silhouette of a crown. There was no chair for me.

"Sir."

"Stuart. Terrible times. I've lost many friends."

I'd forgotten it was all about him.

"But there are things that can't wait," he continued. "You're the best I have left."

I tried to see his words as a compliment. "Thank you, sir."

He was having none of it. He sipped what looked like scotch from a bone-china cup on his side table. There was no cup for visitors.

"Forty better men and women died. Desperate times, now. I have a hundred places that need attention and a dozen people to send. You're the best of a sorry lot."

I couldn't bring myself to thank him for that, but I was relieved to realize I was going to keep my job.

"Nofsinger was supposed to leave for Jota a week ago."

I was startled, then exhilarated, then terrified. Jota wasn't the big leagues; it was the biggest leagues. Negotiations with another world.

My new old boss had been an infant when we launched a series of interstellar probes, targeting a dozen systems with planets that might feasibly support life. He was a young man when we received back the first readings. He was a grandfather when we received the first welcome message from another sentient race.

He had retired once already when the self-guided vessel the Jota sent to us reached Earth. He returned to the service to oversee the installation of the device it contained.

"Encoder/Assembler" was how we translated their name for it, although it could just as easily been called "Machine that uses blueprint to build biological entity identical to the one encoded light-year's distant." But that might have been awkward.

It was their solution to interstellar distances. Relativity could not be tricked into allowing meat to travel at more than a fraction of light speed, but the Jota had found a way to send data faster. Eventually, they developed the technology to map biologicals, right down to the chemically-encoded memories, and assemble exact duplicates. They assured us the process was fatal to the person being encoded, saving us from some confusing duplicate-identity problems.

Now, to send a diplomat on a mission, we encode him or her, transmit the blueprint, and they assemble him or her on the other end, as far as thirty light-years from Earth. When it's time for the diplomat to come home, they send us the updated blueprint, we input the data into their device, add water, and presto!--instant diplomat, absolutely identical to the version on the other end, every memory intact. Although our diplomats have been shuttling out there and back for fifty years, to date none of the aliens has cared to visit Earth.

The whole thing has remained top-secret, but rumors had inevitably spread through the corps. The powers-that-be finally decided to brief us about it, so that we could be sworn to secrecy and imprisoned if we broke that confidence.

"Jota?" I said to the Director.

"We've been negotiating with them for fifty years. They're still feeling us out. Nofsinger thought that in another twenty years or so we might start seeing some results."

"Twenty years?" When I walked in the door, I hadn't expected to confront the rest of my life.

"He had been carrying out a series of five-year missions, returning to Earth in-between for debriefing. Unfortunately, he was in the home office when it was blown up.

"The Jota expected his return a week ago. I need to send somebody, anybody, and soon, or our negotiations may be set back by decades. Five years from now, we'll be back up to speed with trained personnel. Until then, I need to send a warm body, to keep the door open."

I was unable to shape that into a compliment. "I'm not sure I'm the right person," I said.

"You have an opinion? That's nice. You're the right person, because you are the only person available. You leave the day after tomorrow. Get busy reading the file."

"I have some questions," I said.

"You're curious? That's nice. Now, get the hell out of my office."

#

The assignment officer ordered me to report to the local military base the next morning at 6:00 a.m. I asked her why, if I was about to be encoded, then reassembled on a planet twenty light-years away, I had to start before dawn? She told me it was a military thing. They confuse virtue with suffering.

Nofsinger's files on the history of the negotiations were comprehensive, but of little consequence. Evidently he'd had polite meet and greets with tens of thousands of the inhabitants of Jota, but suspected he had tens of thousands to go. He saw it as a vetting process, but he'd stopped caring twenty years ago, after he discovered they used alcohol as a solvent.

There are some honors I'd always hoped to avoid: sacrificing my life in battle, taking the fall for another person's sins, donating an organ before I was dead. I added Jota to my list. I couldn't shake the knowledge that in the travel process my source document was going to die.

I was flown to the encoding station, which, to my surprise, was north of Boise. I was expecting Cheyenne Mountain.

The facility was spooky. Since we had established relations with only half-a-dozen worlds, the place wasn't used more than a couple of times a year. Nonetheless, it was enormous, the kind of magnitude you only find when the expense is buried in the black part of the budget.

The people that worked there were spooky, too. They ran to splotchy complexions, food stains on their lapels, and distracted, about-to-fart stares. I shouldn't have been surprised to run into Elaine, but I was.

"Elaine!" I said when I saw her standing next to a coffin-like cocoon festooned with tubes and wires.

She frowned. "Please don't speak during the process," she said. "It interferes with the instrumentation."

It all clicked into place. Idaho. Table-staring geeks. Retreat for those engaged in top-secret operations. I remembered being told one night, I think I was drinking martinis, that the staff for the facility was chosen for their disinterest in the rest of the human race. They were the non-bonding types, the kids that holed up in their bedrooms and took penknives to family portraits. A millennium earlier they would have been embalmers. Another millennium earlier, they would have worked the rope on the guillotine. Another millennium earlier, they would have been tossing virgins into volcanoes.

I lost sight of Elaine as they began to undress me. Over the course of the next hour I was scrubbed and buffed, shaved from head to foot, purged and dried. Every gram of matter to be reassembled required an extraordinary amount of bandwidth to transmit and energy to reconstruct, so I was 'simplified' as much as possible.

Elaine was there as they slid me into the coffin, though. Like the others, she wouldn't look me in the eye.

Then they injected me with a sedative and I was nowhere for quite a while.

#

It was pitch black when I woke up. I thought my eyes were open, but couldn't tell for sure. Something was pressing against every part of my body, equally, holding me completely motionless.

Gradually I began to feel warmth spread across my back, down my arms and legs, and up my neck and scalp. Eventually, I discovered I could move my fingers minutely, rubbing them against the smooth material encapsulating me. It felt like a water bladder rapidly being pumped dry. A few minutes later, I was unrestrained. The coffin lid opened.

I kept my eyes closed against the sudden glare of Jota. I was surprised at the trepidation I felt about confronting an alien. Screwing up my courage, I opened my eyes.

To my amazement, the alien looked just like Elaine. She was alone.

She tugged me out of the coffin and onto my feet. I grabbed the table to keep from falling.

"Greetings on behalf of the people of Earth," I said. My voice sounded a little higher than I remembered it. I wondered if my blueprint had been garbled in transmission.

"No time for jabber, my love. Put this on." She handed me an orderly's suit and mask.

As I struggled into the clothing, I said, "Ambassador Nofsinger has unfortunately met with an accident…" She cut me off again.

"This way." She grabbed my hand and led me out of the room. The hallway outside was identical to the facility in Idaho, back on Earth.

It was all I could do to keep up with her as she threaded her way through the alien's labyrinth of hallways, chambers and lifts.

I was in a fog, but not so much that I could ignore the familiar touches, such as red fire extinguishers, signs in English, and vending machines offering eighteen brands of cola. It was the bulletin board, with the sign-up form for softball tryouts, that finally confirmed my growing suspicion.

"I'm not on Jota. I'm still on Earth."

She kept pulling me along. "You are on Jota. You are also on Earth."

I pulled back. "But they said I would be dead."

She frowned again. "I bypassed the circuit. Now, hurry."

She shoved me through metal double-doors into a parking garage, jammed me into the closest vehicle, jumped in beside me, and punched in the destination. Sitting next to her in the enclosed space, I could smell her musk.

The drugs were still thick in my system, and the exercise had left me exhausted. I fell asleep immediately, waking only momentarily as she carried me into the house.

After the drugs finally wore off, I woke to find myself alone on a large bed in a small bedroom. It was furnished with a dresser and an entertainment terminal built into the wall. There was a mirror on the ceiling.

One door opened onto a small bathroom. The other door was locked from the outside.

#

I was lying on the bed, exploring the smoothness of my newly-shaved body, when I heard the lock on the door open.

Elaine slipped inside. She was wearing a translucent negligee. "Hello, my love," she said. "Let's screw."

#

It was a couple of days before I learned the whole story. Elaine assured me that my pattern had been sent, and that my doppelganger was on Jota, twenty light-years away, dutifully carrying out my assignment. Normally, the ghouls at the assembly station would have disposed of my source body as they would an amputated limb, right into the furnace.

However, Elaine had concluded, from our night together, that we were soul mates. She told me how distraught she had been when they shipped her home from the retreat as punishment for staying out all night with me.

I was sympathetic, and more than a little flattered. I remembered the first time I had had sex, and how easy it had been to confuse it with love. Every time, actually.

The fact that I was her prisoner tempered my attraction to her, though. I felt like an addict's drug, kept secure under lock and key.

"How can you claim to love me, then keep me penned up like a laboratory rat?" I said during one of her exhaustingly frequent visits.

"I loved my rats. They loved their cage; it was a rat palace, with the best of everything. If I'd let them free, they wouldn't have lived out the week."

I was a human, though, not a rat. No matter how gilded the cage, it didn't soften the knowledge that I was a prisoner. After a week, my state of mind had decayed to the point that I spent hours pacing my room, trying to figure out how I might kill myself. Could I build up enough of a head of steam running across the room to crush my head against the wall? Could I lodge my head in the toilet and snap my neck with the toilet seat?

Fortunately, Elaine soon began to experience orgasm creep. As each act and position became more familiar to her, it yielded her less erotic satisfaction.

I explained to her about fantasy and role-playing, concepts entirely foreign to her. I gradually incorporated the concept of bondage. She was enthusiastic about tying me up with all manners of restraints in a variety of positions, but remained skeptical about being restrained herself.

"It's all about risk," I said. "When you are in control, have nothing at risk, it dampens excitement. Excitement comes from uncertainty. That's why no love is as thrilling as your first, because you'll never feel that uncertain again."

The next day I told her, "It's all about trust. When you refuse to trust anyone, you deny yourself the thrill of knowing they, of their own free will, chose you. You have to give trust if you want to receive love in return."

The next day I told her, "It's all about becoming comfortable with your vulnerability. When you allow yourself to be vulnerable, you make room in your heart for others. As long as you refuse to explore what it means to be vulnerable, our love will never deepen."

She finally gave in. She grew musky as hell as I tied her ankles and wrists to the corners of the bed.

I found some coveralls in her closet that I could squeeze into, some money on her dresser, and the override code for her vehicle. I didn't stop running for four days, until I'd put a continent between us. Then I called the Idaho State Police to check on her, in case she hadn't been able to untie herself.

#

I hadn't thought my escape through very well. I had a notion that I could access at least part of my former life, but found that all of my funds were frozen, all my permissions cancelled. I called my uncle. Before I could say a word, he said, "Sorry, pal, the director's already tipped me off about you. I suggest you quit impersonating my nephew before you find hell raining down on your sorry ass."

Impersonation. I got it, then. The old/new director had a million people he could call upon to help cover up Elaine's indiscretion and maintain program secrecy. Officially, I was screwed.

So I went underground, descending through the strata of human society until I disappeared.

No life of privilege is possible without the labors of the invisible. Old European mansions were built with servant's passageways inside the walls; not much has changed since then. For every afternoon you spend lounging next to the pool, there is someone that digs the hole for the pool, somebody that scrapes sewage from the skin of the water, somebody that grows the sugar cane to ferment into rum, somebody in a crumbling shell of a building in a rat-infested slum that glues brightly-colored paper onto tiny wooden umbrella forms to stick in your mixed drink.

That was me. I followed the fruit harvest, hand-picking organics for people who mistrusted anything picked mechanically. For a while, I rode second seat for a geezer who refused to retire from his delivery route, helping him wrestle gas tanks in and out of the huge estates around Lake Champlain. I finally settled into steady work as a personal assistant to three matrons in a small town on the north shore of Lake Erie, running errands, fixing stuff around the house, filling in as a fourth for bridge, and escorting them to couples-mandatory events. They paid in room, board and a little pocket cash, all under the table.

In return for providing a place for me to hide, though, they expected obedience. They were not above petty humiliations, either, especially in front of those they wished to impress. The oldest was especially deft at phrasing a threat to me that sounded, to others, like a throwaway remark. All in all, mine was pretty typical of the life of someone who was invisible.

#

All the while, I was keeping my eye on the calendar. I obsessed on my old life. The further I was removed from it, the more alluring it grew in my memory. I lusted for it, and I could think of only one way to get it back.

 When the fifth anniversary of my trip to the Idaho facility came around, I took my leave of the matrons-- in the middle of the night, and without leaving a note.

I'd made friends with a woman who worked in the land transport terminal nearby, and she found me stowaway space in a shipment headed west. A day later, I was back home in Seattle.

The city hadn't changed much, but I had. For the first time, I took note of which alleys might serve as a places to sleep undisturbed, which restaurants might be good for a handout.

I sat at the coffee house across the street from my old duplex for a long time, enjoying the familiar ambience of gray skies and a mist off of the bay that wasn't quite rain. I'd walked up the alley behind my home earlier and found the house key right where I'd left it, under the white rock at the corner of the garage.

I'd made arrangements with my bank before I left for Idaho five years earlier to keep the rent paid on the duplex while I was gone. The place appeared unchanged.

I walked across the street. The key still fit the door. Once inside, old habit took me directly to the security pad in the closet. I thumbed it to turn off the security system. I was hoping my network account had been reactivated in preparation for my scheduled return from Jota.

The light kept blinking.

I thumbed it again.

It kept blinking.

I pressed the retina button, placed my eye in front of the scanner.

It blinked faster.

Then it started to hoot.

The sound is designed to loosen the bowels of anyone within a city block, and it hit me like a bucket of ice water. I couldn't leave the house fast enough. I ran through the kitchen to the back door, fumbled open the deadbolts, ran out into the alley and on down the hill until I hit the bay. I heard the police sirens approaching, so I walked out onto the dock to the houseboat village and climbed onto the deck of one that appeared to be unoccupied. I sat watching the bay for the rest of the afternoon.

Obviously, my biometric was still off the grid. I couldn't even get into my own house, much less access my accounts.

It was fortunate that I'd made note of the city's underground, because that's where I spent the next two weeks. When it rained, I visited the library. When it didn't, I sat on the shore, watching the boats come and go.

I did have a dry place to sleep at night, fortunately. Just before I'd left for Jota, the garage circuit of my security system had fried, and I hadn't had time to get it fixed. After dark each evening I returned to my garage to sleep, in the back seat of the ancient Mustang that had been in my family since the petroleum age.

It was almost two weeks later when, just as I'd settled down to read myself to sleep, I saw the kitchen lights in the house switch on.

I jumped out of the car, grabbed the tire iron from the trunk, and crouched behind the cabinet next to the door. My heart was suddenly racing with five years of pent-up frustration. Five years of looking over my shoulder, of passing cash under the table, accepting the petty humiliations, and refusing any human involvement of consequence. Five years of my career gone. Five years of being invisible.

I prayed Jota-Me had not already been to the garage before I returned for the evening. I knew that one of the first things he (I)'d do after arriving home from Jota was check on the car. He (I) believed he (I) could still smell my parents in the upholstery.

I (I) didn't have to wait long. He (I) was nothing if not predictable, especially by me. Jota-me opened the door, turned on the light and stepped inside.

I didn't give myself time to think. In one motion, I (I) stood up and swung the tire iron with all my might. My (his) head exploded like a melon.

In that moment, I (I) suddenly realized several things about myself. That I (I) still thought of Jota-me and me(me) as two distinct individuals. That I (I) had come to blame Jota-me for my problems. That I (I) didn't expect killing Jota-me to feel like murder.

As soon as I felt the tire iron hit his (my) skull, I realized I (I) was wrong, wrong, wrong. I was overwhelmed with feelings of betrayal, self-loathing, isolation, and fear. I felt pity, but for which of us was unclear. For the first time, I truly felt like I deserved to be invisible.

I rolled him (me) over so I didn't have to look at my brains leaking out of the back of my head. Between waves of nausea, I stared down at me on the floor.

I was fat! God, I had let myself go. My belly drooped onto the floor like a belt of water balloons. Extra chins descended my neck like layers of a wedding cake.

My fingers were enormous. I put my thumb next to my thumb. It looked like a child's.

My eyes were open, staring up at me. I reached over to close them, but something struck me as odd. I leaned closer. My eyes were more than bloodshot. They were the eyes of an alcoholic, riddled with broken vessels, scarred.

That's when I realized the futility of my murder. The first thing the encoder/decoder crew would have done when Jota-me was reassembled back on Earth was update my system biometrics profile, prints, retinal scan, so the network could recognize him after a five-year absence. Nothing of the me that had never left Earth would match the me that returned from Jota. The house, the bank account, the job, were all networked to the fat me on the floor, not me. Tantalizingly close, yet out of reach of my skinny, skinny fingers.

Later that night, I wrestled my body into our Mustang, drove me to a secluded cliff north of town. I spent a while trying to come up with some words to speak over my body. I felt the need for a little ceremony, but everything I came up with sounded boastful or self-pitying. In the end, I just shook my hand goodbye and threw me into the ocean.

I watched my life wash in and out on the waves for the best part of half an hour, before it finally cleared the shoals and floated out of sight.

#

It took me another year of living invisible to finally catch up with myself. So much food. So much wine. I don't think I'll ever enjoy food or drink again.

So many trips to the ATM, to see if my fingers were fat enough to open my account yet. Finally, they were.

Now I'm back in my old house. In the pile of mail, I found the old man's letter, telling me the service didn't need me any more. It had been postmarked the day of my return from Jota.

What I haven't been able to find is my life. I never realized how much people change in six years. Those I thought of as my friends had changed. I had changed. Not in the same direction.

Without my friends or my career, I found I had no life.

So I was feeling pretty sorry for myself this morning, before the mail arrived. In it, I found an envelope, sandwiched between two catalogues. It was hand-addressed. The writing was very neat. The return address was a small town in central Idaho.

Inside was a valentine. From Elaine.

I'm going to write back.