Nobody killed themselves the first two weeks. The rush of orientation had kept everyone too busy, out of their rooms and out of their heads. No one really noticed the first one, a pale kid named Paul, who shot himself in his single room on the southwest side of the 9th floor. Not one of the building’s 6,000 occupants had gotten the chance to know him. He had kept to himself in his small single room. He hadn’t attended any of the weeks of welcome events and he had never visited any of the many conciliatory common areas. At most someone may have seen him wordlessly wandering the vast Costco on the first floor, but that was it. No one knew him, so no one mourned him. No one flagged it as the start of any trend or omen of ill-fated architecture. The RA of his floor put together a half-hearted suicide prevention talk, but that was about it. The news barely made it down past the 8th floor.
Jessica felt restless. She fiddled with the sun imitation screen on her wall. Even though it was only two in the afternoon she set the brightness to sunset. The building had been constructed in such a way as to make more than 90% of the rooms windowless, and to compensate little monitors that were supposed to imitate windows had been installed on the walls. The screen even had a little curtain and a knob Jessica could turn to control the level of sunlight, which had actually been touted as a feature of the building: when else in your life had you been able to control the sun? Jessica had the room, and the sun, to herself. She lay down in the fake twilight. She had psych homework she needed to complete but not right now. She always felt so drained in her room. There was something about this building that made her forget the world outside of it. She had been spending as little time in the dorm as possible, taking the chance to take in the Michigan fall, but it had been raining non-stop for the past few days. However, after a few hours, Jessica needed to get out of the building, rain or no rain.
The deserted, rainswept, campus should have been dreary, but it refreshed Jessica. She liked the smell of rain and the feel of it against her face and she liked the emptiness it brought to the campus. The sky was steel gray, only a few shades off from the dorm building which loomed ominously against it. Jessica was fascinated by the building. Its geometry seemed unreal, almost projective. Its construction had been controversial but rapid and employed the concept of repeatability, in the words of the designer, who at 90 had taken up architecture after a long and lucrative career as an executive at an investment conglomerate. The concrete had been poured off-site, which would allow the structure to last as long as the pyramids, and the streamlined design improved upon Le Corbusier’s, which was too narrow to be interesting and didn’t work worth shit anyway. Jessica ignored a text from Tyler, who just wanted to fuck, and walked without destination, letting herself get lost in the rain.
***
When she got back to the building the first thing she needed to do was take a shower, which was how she always felt after spending time in the rain and which she had always found silly, since the rain and the shower were both just water. Still, she felt like she wouldn’t be able to get properly dry without first taking a shower. The bathroom was communal, shared by the eight girls in her suite. When she walked in she heard the sound of a running shower but the light was off. She called out to see if anyone was in the room, taking a shower in the dark, but no one answered. She felt uneasy. She turned the light on. It flickered for a moment before flooding the room with fluorescence. Jessica had already grown to hate this light. It was somehow both too bright and not bright enough. The bathroom mirrors, in that light, always seemed to reflect back to her a dead girl, washed out and pale. It took a moment for Jessica’s eyes to adjust to the sudden brightness. It took a moment for the body to take on color and shape and form until suddenly the swinging figure revealed itself all at once.
Jessica turned away quickly, but not before looking into Kenzie Hoffman’s lifeless face.
Kenzie hadn’t said anything about feeling depressed. Sure, she had seemed a little withdrawn in the past couple of weeks, but Jessica hadn’t known her that long. She would have never expected this.
The water from the shower was a steady pulse. The fluorescent light hummed. Hissed even.
Jessica avoided looking towards Kenzie’s body. She felt guilty that she couldn’t even look at Kenzie, like she was letting her down somehow, rejecting her humanity, as if her refusal to look at the body was what really killed her.
She tried to close her eyes but the fluorescent bled through.
The first person to arrive, alerted by a scream that Jessica had not realized she had let out, was Jessica’s friend and suitemate, Casey. She saw Jessica crumpled on the ground but not, yet, Kenzie’s body.
“Is everything ok? I heard yelling.”
Jessica tried to answer. She heard herself making sounds but she couldn’t be sure whether or not those sounds corresponded to words. She felt like she was choking. She felt underwater.
Casey had no idea what Jessica was trying to say, until she did.
Jessica followed Casey’s eyes as they found Kenzie’s hanging body.
“Oh my god,” Casey said, quietly.
She put her arms around Jessica.
“Jessica, you’re soaking wet. What happened?”
“No, don’t, don’t worry. About me. I just… went for a walk. I just went for a walk in the rain I just needed to get outside. I. Don’t worry about me.”
She trailed off. She felt underwater. She felt underwater and things were happening but they felt underwater too. Alicia, the resident advisor, a senior from California who had told Jessica about watching the building go up, arrived, summoned by Jessica’s screaming, and called security as soon as she saw the body and soon after, after what felt like forever, the room was filled with foreign bodies, men, police officers investigating a potential crime scene and coroners removing the body and university functionaries negotiating between the others to make sure the institution would face no liability responsibility, deferred from party to party until someone high enough on the chain of command permitted the body to be taken away and it all felt underwater.
Back in Jessica’s room, the screen was still set to twilight. She had no idea what time it was outside. She finally had the chance to take off the wet clothes. Her skin was wrinkled and chilled. She put on a pair of old sweatpants and one of Tyler’s hoodies. She needed a hot shower, something to scald away the residue of death, but there was no way she would be able to go back to the showers now. Instead, she just lay on her bed in the false twilight, trying to empty her mind.
There was a small, ill attended vigil for Kenzie, but otherwise everyone tried to get on with business as usual. Classes continued. Sometimes Jessica went. She learned about the Stanford Prison Experiment in her Introduction to Psychology class. She learned about comma splices in her First Year Writing class. She learned about communications in her Communications class. One day, her Mathematics for the Social Sciences professor brought in a vintage mechanical calculator and demonstrated it for the class. It looked like a typewriter attached to a small car engine. She appreciated the way his eyes lit up as he watched the class watch the machine click and clank as he inputted increasingly complex equations. He then excitedly showed what would happen to the machine when you attempt to divide by zero. Rather than just spit up an error message, the machine convulsed, actually convulsed, shaking as its old fashioned gears cranked quickly and the number-counter looped over and over and over. She thought it would stop but it didn’t. It just kept clanging. Her professor just let the machine shake on the desk, looking out at the class like Math? Actually pretty cool, right? It made Jessica nervous, the sound and the way it wouldn’t stop. It seemed like the machine knew what was happening to it but was powerless to stop it. Jessica debated whether asking the professor to stop the whole thing, but she didn’t want to draw attention to herself, especially since the rest of the class was seeming to realize that math could actually be pretty cool, at least when it could make a piece of vintage mechanical equipment experience a violent existential crisis. Finally though, the professor pulled a lever and the machine settled back down.
“They had to add that lever,” said her professor, “because otherwise it would just keep on going forever.
“The lesson,” he added in mock solemnity, “is don’t ever divide by zero.”
More often, though, she found herself missing classes, to various levels of understanding from her instructors. She withdrew into herself. She left her room less and less. She kept the sun window set to a perpetual twilight haze. She was supposed to be on close monitoring because of the shock but nobody really checked up on her. Tyler, a pale-handsome pothead in track pants who lived in the boys’ suite across from hers and who she had fucked at a party during the second week of school, was more supportive than she thought he would be and their relationship progressed from a casual hook-up into something they both had to admit could only be called boyfriend-girlfriend. Alicia, the RA came to visit and checked in a few times. The visits were short and awkward. Amy, a sweet girl from Peachtree Park, Georgia, came by a couple of times to check on Jessica with some fresh baked cookies. Jessica was touched by the gesture but didn’t know how to properly thank Amy. Jessica found Amy’s positivity emotionally draining and felt ungrateful for feeling that way.
Mostly though, Jessica just spent time alone, falling deeper into depression. At first Jessica had been angry at Kenzie for hanging herself in the bathroom and making her deal with that trauma but she began to understand. She understood the urge to make everyone else confront your corpse. Make them look at you. Look at you in the eyes. Those eyes that bulged as the noose gripped your neck. She thought about hanging herself in the bathroom like Kenzie. She thought about jumping but, even though the building was tall, there were no windows.. She thought about shooting herself but she didn’t know where to get a gun. She thought about taking a bottle of pills. She thought about slitting her wrists. She thought about slitting her throat. One time she even thought about lighting herself on fire in front of the student housing center, to make a spectacle of it, to make sure no one forgot her. She imagined all sorts of violence done to her body. Mostly, she thought about drowning.
Halloween came. It seemed strange to be celebrating, but there was something comforting about the familiarity of the ritual, the cardboard ghosts and garlands of nylon cobwebs filled with plastic spiders. Someone had placed a life-sized plastic skeleton in the common room. Whenever Jessica visited he was wearing a new hat, a cowboy hat or a fireman’s hat or a Detroit Tigers hat. There had been more suicides, talked about in tones that were somewhere between hushed and offhand, but Halloween gave everyone something else to focus on.
There was a party on the floor on Halloween night. Jessica went as she always did– a cat, with pink painted nose, six stripes of black whisker paint, and cat ears. Casey went as a sexy nun. Tyler went as himself until Jessica’s eye rolls convinced him to put on someone’s spare skeleton mask.
Jessica found herself in conversation with Zoe, a shy art student in Jessica’s suite who kept largely to herself, and listened as Zoe tried to explain her costume. Zoe offered Jessica a drink from her flask. Jessica accepted gratefully—straight gin. Zoe was saying more than Jessica had ever heard her say, talking about her art, some sort of collage, in quick torrents, a couple drinks ahead of Jessica, a couple thoughts ahead too, maybe, until eventually she asked Jessica what she was studying, eyes lighting up when Jessica answered “psych.” She let Jessica know that she was fascinated by psychology and in fact would have even maybe been a psych major if she wasn’t studying art and who knows maybe she’ll end up double majoring and what are you taking how are you liking your classes?
Jessica told her about the introductory psychology classes she was taking.
“Do you want to be a therapist? Or a researcher? Or?” asked Zoe.
Jessica had, to be honest, no idea.
“It’s still early. You know,” she said.
“Oh totally. I get it. I just find the whole thing so fascinating. I remember at the beginning of the semester I was talking to Kenzie about…”
She stopped short. Her face fell.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Jessica, who just wanted the conversation to be over.
“I don’t want to trigger you. I can’t imagine seeing that,” said Zoe.
“I just don’t really want to talk about it.”
Zoe seemed embarrassed. She kept apologizing. Jessica found herself in the role of comforting Zoe.
It was Tyler who saved her, pulling her away from the conversation and handing her a flask (vodka). Soon she was pleasantly drunk. Everyone seemed drunk, even Alicia, the RA, who was dressed as Rey from Star Wars and ignored the obvious smell of weed when Jessica and Casey disappeared with Kendall, who lived the room over from Casey, and returned red eyed. The party was packed. Students had come from all over the building. One boy from their hall came as Kenzie. He wore a noose around his neck, painted his face white, and, for some reason, painted blood coming spilling from his mouth. Casey spotted him before Jessica did and confronted him immediately. Jessica had never seen Casey yell like that. No one saw him the rest of the night. By that point Jessica was in a full and pleasant haze that even the boy’s callousness couldn’t damper. Jessica and Tyler made out. Casey made out with a boy Jessica had never seen. Jessica even saw Kendall, dressed in a French maid outfit that barely passed as a Halloween costume, making out with a boy Jessica recognized from class, even though Jessica was pretty sure she had a boyfriend who didn’t go to the school. Jessica stole another swig from Tyler’s flask. She danced. At one point Tyler got hold of the aux and played the “Monster Mash” four times until anyone noticed, at which point Amy, dressed as a penguin, wrestled it away from him and put on some upbeat dancepop. Jessica secretly wished that the “Monster Mash” was still playing. For a while Jessica was able to put Kenzie at the back of her mind, the playful spookiness of the costumes and decorations warding off the real dread.
Eventually, she found herself in Tyler’s room, first sitting on his bed, then lying on it. He fucked like the inexperienced eighteen year old boy he was, but his dick worked. Her thoughts, however, kept drifting. In the silence of the room, with only Tyler’s panting to drown them out, her thoughts returned to Kenzie. She hadn’t been able to cum since she found her body. Every time she came close, her mind would drift back to that moment and her body would shut down. Fucking felt good though, and she wanted desperately to be able to focus on it. She felt Tyler’s body weight as he thrust inside of her. It was his weight on top of her more than his thrusting cock that was turning her on, the feeling of being pinned down. She tried to pull herself as close to Tyler as she could. The more she focused the further it slipped out of her grasp.
“Choke me,” she said.
“What?” asked Tyler. He slowly pulled back from her but didn’t stop entirely.
“Choke me,” she repeated, more desperately, this time almost pleading.
Tyler didn’t answer. He just stuttered.
“Fucking choke me. Please, Tyler.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”
“No, it’s a good idea. It’s ok. I promise.”
“I’ve never done that,” said Tyler. He looked apologetic. “What if I, like, I hurt you. I don’t want to hurt you. Or like get in trouble or something. I feel like I could get in trouble. I don’t know. You’re pretty drunk.”
“Yeah I’m drunk, so what,” said Jessica. Her nails were digging into his skin. “I’m asking you to do this. Don’t be a fucking pussy because you’re scared of getting in trouble.”
She drew him closer to her and looked him in the eyes.
“Choke me,” she said again. “I’m so close.”
Tyler hesitated and then put his hands around her neck.
Jessica felt a thrilling blankness go through her body, down to her cunt. She struggled for breath like a drowning person struggles for air, even if they had walked into the water with the intention of killing themselves. Her chest burned and a darkness crept into her periphery. When she came she trashed so hard that she threw Tyler’s hands off of her neck. She was grateful for breath but also disappointed. Part of her wished that Tyler had kept choking until the darkness had spread across everything. She sat up and tried to catch her ragged breath.
“Are you ok?” asked Tyler. He seemed uncertain, a little shaken even.
“Yeah,” said Jessica.
“You were really shaking. I wasn’t sure.”
“Yeah, that’s because you’ve never made a girl cum before,” said Jessica.
Tyler looked hurt. She had meant it to be playful but when she heard she knew it sounded hostile. Tyler turned away from her and didn’t say anything the rest of the night.
The next morning, she found herself in Tyler’s bed with a hangover and a vague sense of dread. Tyler lay on the bed next to her, snoring. The bare white walls of Tyler’s room had no decoration except a poster for the movie Drive halfheartedly taped to the wall. The bareness of the room made it seem smaller. She left quickly, without waking him.
A cold dread rolled up her like a snapped tendon as she walked back to her room. The trash of last night’s party littered the hall. Everything seemed exactly like itself, but more so, like a photo on an old flip phone, everything exactly as it is but drained of life in the dead and blinding light. The hall was still covered in Halloween decorations, the ghosts and the skeletons and the bats and the spiders. Whatever talismanic effects had been invested in them the night before had been stripped and they hung there on the walls like regular things made of plastic and cardboard, representing nothing but themselves, merely real. They seemed scarier that way.
When she got back to her room, she texted Tyler an apology for leaving without saying anything and then set the window light to twilight and lay on her bed, and in a vague haze fell back asleep. When she woke again it was in a cold panic. Her heart was beating fast, out of time with the rest of her body, which seemed a step behind itself. Her head hurt. It took her a moment to readjust to her surroundings. She was overwhelmed by the unrelenting dimensionality of everything asserting itself. The room seemed like itself but more so. Seventy square feet had never seemed so much like seventy square feet. She saw that she had messages from Tyler
don’t worry about it
just woke up
-delivered 2:06
***
It was almost 5 now. Time was beginning to lose its meaning.
She sent Tyler another text.
i had fun last night (devil emoji)
Then 5 minutes later
how are you
-delivered 5:02
-read 5:06
Tyler didn’t respond. Jessica wished he would. She was a little worried about him. He was always evasive about his feelings. She could tell that he was feeling depressed, and she wished he would open up to her.
She was too anxious to go to the cafeteria, so she ate a banana and a bag of skittles and watched Real Housewives until it was late enough to drift back to sleep.
***
The 8th floor had begun the semester with 512 occupants, just like the other 10 floors in the building, and, like every floor, it was divided into 8 halls which were further divided into 8 suites, which each housed 8 single room—a brute fractal efficiency that had begun to shape the psychic architecture of its residents. Jessica was having less and less contact with people who didn’t live on her floor, a pattern that seemed to be repeated throughout the building. The architect, the former hedge fund manager, had expressed hope that his design would encourage circulation among the students, but the opposite was turning out to be the case. Even among the floors, people were withdrawing into their halls and suites and rooms. Into themselves.
Things started to get out of hand after Halloween. The campus entered deep Fall—the bright red foliage gave way to bare trees whose tangled limbs stood stark against the dwindling sun. Suicide was becoming a steady pulse throughout the building, floor by floor, hall by hall, suite by suite, room by room. Person by person. 29 people killed themselves on November 1st alone. The suicides were a communal crisis but they happened in isolation. Though nobody really talked about the suicides, it was still the only topic of conversation. Time passed. Time passed but you would only notice if you really focused. Otherwise, time felt static.
One day Jessica saw Zoe in the common room. Her arms were covered in fresh cuts that she was making no made no effort to hide. She was pale and glassy-eyed. Jessica wanted to say something, but she had no idea what to say. She realized she had been avoiding Zoe since the Halloween party. She had trouble even meeting Zoe’s eyes. Jessica thought of the way she had looked away from Kenzie’s body. Guilt washed over her. She steeled herself and asked Zoe if she was ok. Zoe’s answer was non-committal and far away.
“Do you need anything,” asked Jessica. She hoped the answer would be no. She didn’t know what she could do for Zoe.
Zoe didn’t answer immediately.
“No, I don’t think so,” she finally said. Her voice was quiet.
Almost reflexively, Jessica told Zoe to just ask if she needed anything.
“Thank you,” responded Zoe. She gave a weak smile.
That night Jessica was awoken by a banging on her door. She had fallen into the habit of using sleeping pills to fall asleep, and she was disoriented upon being woken up. It took her a moment to realize what was happening or even where she was. Zoe was at the door. For a moment Jessica thought that Zoe was already dead. Her face was pale and corpselike and her eyes were vacant. She looked like she was staring into a different, dead, world. Her face was bleeding. She had cut herself across her cheekbone. That cut was small, but the cut on the topside of her forearm was not. It was long and deep and bleeding profusely.
Zoe apologized for waking Jessica. She apologized for the state she was in. She apologized for a number of things that Jessica couldn’t understand. Jessica tried to assure Zoe she had nothing to apologize for but felt incoherent. Her words didn’t feel like her own. Her brain was still in a fog from the sleeping pills, as if she were still asleep—not dreaming, but sleepwalking through someone else’s nightmare. She invited Zoe in and closed the door.
“I’m sorry,” said Zoe again. “I need help. I have these bad feelings. I have these bad feelings I can feel them in my body they’re ripping me apart they’re going to kill me, do you understand, they are going to swallow me. I don’t know how to explain it. I’m sorry. I don’t know how to explain it I don’t know how to put it into words. I don’t know what to do.”
Zoe kept anxiously pulling at her hair and rubbing her face.
“I’m sorry to bother you. I need help. I didn’t know what else to do. I’m scared of what I might do.”
Jessica thought about asking her what she meant by the last sentence, but she already knew the answer and didn’t want to ask it just to have something to say. She didn’t want to hear it aloud. She wasn’t sure what to do. She felt half a step behind her own body.
“I’m so sorry,” she said weakly.
“I’m scared. I don’t know what to do,” said Zoe. “I just need this to stop. Ok. I just need this feeling to stop.”
“Let’s go get Alicia,” Jessica said. “I’m sure she’ll know what to do.”
Jessica felt guilty that all she could think to do was pass the problem on to someone else.
But that was all Alicia could think to do, too. She greeted them with a tired look. After Jessica explained the situation, Alicia invited them into her room. She called campus security and boiled water in an electric kettle. The call was brief. They sat in silence for a moment afterwards, until the whistle of the kettle broke it. Zoe began talking as Alicia poured the three of them cups of tea. Once Zoe started, she didn’t stop. She talked about feeling like a failure, mostly, that was the biggest thing, a burden, not being sure what she was even doing.
“I guess I just hoped that things were going to change in college. I’ve always been so lonely. I didn’t have many friends in high school and people said that this would change in college but it hasn’t. I’m even lonelier than I was before. I’m just spending all my time in this tiny room and I’m not even making anything.”
Jessica drank her tea as Zoe spoke. It was bitter, and she didn’t really like it, but she drank it to have something to do.
“I thought things would be different,” Zoe continued. “I thought I would be different. It was stupid to think that.”
She spoke fast.
“I’m sorry. I keep repeating myself and I haven’t come any closer to saying what I’m trying to say. I don’t even think I can. I feel like such a burden. I don’t deserve to live. If everyone else is killing themselves then what right do I have to live.”
Alicia interjected with an affirmation or contradiction of some sort every now and then, but Jessica remained silent. She had no idea what to say, worried anything she said would just be the incoherent ramblings of someone talking in their sleep. She felt the caffeine beginning to work. A nervous tremor ran through her body and she could sense her eyes dilating—it was as if her vision was imprinting its own image on itself. In high school, when the adolescent drive for a new high was strong but good drugs were hard to come by, she had dated a boy who had devised a system where he forced himself to stay awake after taking his mother’s Ambien. He claimed the effect was comparable to acid. Jessica had now, by accident, stumbled into the same combination, and though the effect wasn’t nearly as strong as the boyfriend had claimed, she felt estranged from her body and the room around her, the white walls of which Alicia had covered with Star Wars posters and pictures of Korean boy bands yet still asserted their null presence.
“I can’t even describe it,” said Zoe. “And that just makes it worse somehow. Being unable to explain it. Like if I could put words to it would go away. But at the same time, if I could describe it there somehow wouldn’t be anything to describe. Do you know what I mean? I keep trying and never get any closer. I know I’m repeating myself. But I can’t stop. I’m sorry.”
She sounded far away to Jessica.
“I’m sorry,” said Zoe again
Eventually, someone from campus security came and escorted Zoe away. When, a week later, Jessica saw her again, she said that she had spent 24 hours under observation and then been discharged, upon which she had been given a counselor to talk to remotely, over video. They weren’t actually helpful, being just a person on a screen.
Kendall was by now spending all of her time at her boyfriend’s, off-campus. Jessica hadn’t seen her since Halloween. Bong-Cha, the Korean international student, had returned to Korea. They were both better off. The building was dangerous. And it was the building. The only time Jessica left her room was to go to class or get something to eat. The room felt like a cell, but she was starting to have panic attacks every time she left it, as if she couldn’t bear to be apart from it. Her life in the classroom, outside of the dorm, felt foreign to her, as if it were someone else’s. She watched herself slide deeper into depression, helpless to stop it. Sometimes she thought about killing herself, but that would require her to take an action of some sort—the depression that drove her to feeling suicidal also prevented the consummation of the action. She avoided everyone, even Alicia, especially Alicia, who, as an RA, might have been able to help her, but the patina of authority Alicia had was enough to deter Jessica from reaching out to her. As bad as things were here, Jessica wanted to avoid hospitalization even more, and she had seen how Alicia had dealt with Zoe when she reached out for help.
There was no reason to ask for help. Everyone had the same look in their eyes, the same desperate look that Jessica saw in her own eyes, a look that said, “I can’t help you.” Even Amy had the look, even though she went to greater lengths to hide it than anyone Jessica knew. Jessica, on one of the increasingly rare times she ventured to the common area, saw Amy at a desk, working on homework. Amy greeted her with a smile and warm voice that Jessica didn’t even try to match, but as she saw Amy’s face fall as soon as she thought Jessica had looked away. It touched Jessica, how much work Amy put into being cheerful, in spite of it all, and she resolved to do something to show her appreciation. That weekend, she tried to bake brownies for Amy but they turned out burnt and inedible, so she threw them away and never mentioned it to Amy.
Whatever time she didn’t spend alone, she spent with Tyler. They watched YouTube videos together. They watched fail compilations. They watched cringe compilations. They watched hour-long explainers for movies they had never seen. They watched trailers for movies they would never watch. They watched conspiracy videos. They watched British people react to American food. They watched Korean teens react to Mr. Bean. They watched a makeup tutorial one time, but Tyler complained, and they never watched another one. One night, when Jessica was sleeping in her room and Tyler in his, someone in the room next to Tyler’s shot themselves. Tyler had told Jessica he had heard the shot.. Jessica tried to talk to him about it but every time she brought it up he was evasive. He seemed vacant, hollowed by percs or xans or something. The drugs concerned her. His reticence pissed her off. That stoic manliness bullshit was inappropriate for a time like this. She needed him to be open with her. She wanted to help him, but she couldn’t if he didn’t ask. She resented the toxic masculinity that kept him from asking for help, but she also tried to feel empathy for him because she knew it wasn’t his fault, he had just been raised in a patriarchal society that punished men for showing weakness, for talking about their feelings, for even asking for help but even if this was societal it was still the decision he was making now. She never told him any of this. They watched compilations of old sitcoms. Anything to fill the hours, anything to drown out the silence and their own thoughts, nothing that required too much effort.
Weeks washed away like this, disappearing into the haze and suddenly finals were coming up. Jessica felt that if she made it to the end of the semester she would be ok. She just needed to be free from this place. This feeling wouldn’t follow her.
Zoe killed herself the weekend before finals. It had been inevitable, Jessica recognized herself thinking. It wasn’t a surprise, but Jessica was appalled by how little the news made her feel. She focused on studying for finals. Against all odds, she was passing all her classes. Cs mostly, but passing. She could make it through one week.
That Sunday, Alicia called a meeting for the remaining girls. The suite was down to four, including Alicia. Jessica didn’t want to go. She just wanted to sleep, but it was three in the afternoon. She turned the sun screen off as if she were drawing the blinds but she couldn’t make herself fall asleep, so after fifteen minutes of lying awake in the dark she decided she might as well go. Alicia, Amy, and Casey were already there when she arrived. They were talking about Zoe. Alicia was, as Jessica had expected, reciting RA manual bullshit. Jessica became angrier the more she listened. She thought back to the night that she and Zoe had spent in Alicia’s room and how Alicia had just let the campus security take Zoe away. All anyone did was pass the problem onto the first person they could find.
“You don’t even care,” she heard herself say.
Alicia looked hurt but didn’t say anything at first.
“You don’t care like I do,” said Jessica. The words seemed as if they were coming from somewhere else. She wished Alicia would say something, if only because Jessica’s own voice sounded so strange to her.
“Of course I care,” said Alicia, finally. “Why would you even say that?”
“You could have helped her. She came to you for help and you turned her away.”
“I didn’t turn her away,” said Alicia. “I did everything I could.”
“No, you just passed her along to someone else,” said Jessica.
“I did everything I could.”
“Yeah, well, it wasn’t enough. Everyone keeps dying. You’re the RA. Aren’t you supposed to do something?” said Jessica. Her voice strained.
“Yeah, I’m a fucking RA. I was trained to keep people from smoking weed and playing music too loud. I wasn’t trained for this. What the fuck do you want from me, Jessica?” said Alicia.
“Do something. I don’t fucking know. Something. I’m going crazy,” said Jessica.
“You’re not the only one this is happening to, ok. I’m in this too, you know,” said Alicia.
Jessica felt her face get hot and her hands go cold. Of course she wasn’t the only one this was happening too. She fucking knew that. Fuck Alicia for insinuating that she was making it about herself.
The next time she heard her voice it sounded dead, monotone.
“Fuck you, you stupid bitch,” she said.
Casey stepped between them.
“Jessica,” she said, quietly. “We’re all scared. Please don’t take it out on Alicia.”
“I can’t believe you’re taking her side. You’re supposed to be my friend or something.”
“Please, Jessica. I am your friend. You know that,” said Casey. Her voice was calm, which only made Jessica more agitated.
“I haven’t seen you in a fucking month. Some friend.”
“You haven’t left your room. When I was supposed to see you?” said Casey.
“Fuck you,” was all Jessica could say.
“We can’t turn on each other now,” said Amy.
She reached out to hold Jessica’s hand.
“Don’t fucking touch me. Don’t you dare fucking touch me you stupid fucking freak bitch. Get the fuck away from me,” said Jessica.
She wrenched her hand away from Amy and pushed her aside.
“Jessica,” said Casey. “Please don’t leave us.”
Her voice trailed off as if she were already resigned to Jessica’s departure.
“It’s not my fault,” said Alicia quietly from behind Jessica. She might have been crying. Jessica didn’t turn around to tell. She was already out the door.
***
Things only got worse from there. There was a rumor that a boy a few floors down had shot up his hall, killing others before turning the gun on himself, but by this point even a couple of floors was too far away for news to travel. There were only rumors. It may as well have been on the other side of the country. Locally, Alicia killed herself on Tuesday. Even if she was only an RA, and despite the anger Jessica felt towards her, her presence had reassured Jessica. With Alicia gone, there was not even the pretense of authority in the hall, and for the first time Jessica felt truly on her own. Her depression was punctuated by cold but unreal dread, one that felt like someone else’s nightmare. She observed herself becoming more depersonalized from herself. Not for the first time she was having trouble telling where her body ended and the world outside her began. The only thing that felt real was the building itself. The building was too real. Jessica knew that she wasn’t real. She wouldn’t have been able to explain if she tried. She was not herself. Her loneliness and fear were not her own. The loneliness belonged to the building. Everyone was on their own, together. The suicides were everywhere in isolation, in single rooms, in a building planned around a theoretically endless repetition of divisions, subdivided now to the point of nullification, and was somehow dividing by zero, as if the architecture itself had reached past its terminal point into a dead zone that was, strictly speaking, outside of the realm of mathematic possibility. It hardly seemed worth mentioning. It was just too common. Suicide was like the poor ventilation and slow elevators on the east wing—just another universal feature of the building.
The fear, however, was new. She felt like a dog that needed to chew its own leg off, not even to escape a trap but just out of some rapid impulse. She stopped eating and started cutting her shins with a butterfly knife she had stolen from Tyler in November after he had made a series of worrying comments. She wasn’t going to kill herself—how could she kill herself if she wasn’t even real? She avoided Casey and Amy, the only two other girls left in her suite. She couldn’t bear to see them. She still hadn’t forgiven them for taking Alicia’s side. She spent most of her time in Tyler’s room now, laying in his bed in a haze, sleeping and not sleeping, talking and not talking. It was 3pm and she was waking up. It was 1am and she was falling asleep. It was 2am and she was waking up. Tyler had found his knife—Jessica had not put any effort into hiding it—and was playing with it. He lay it against his wrist.
“Maybe if I fall asleep like this my hand will slip in my sleep and kill me,” he said, joking and not joking.
“Please don’t say that,” said Jessica.
He took the knife and absentmindedly drew it across the top of his forearm. A thin line of blood became visible.
“Fucking don’t,” yelled Jessica. “I mean it.”
“Sorry,” he mumbled.
He rubbed the blood off. Another line rose to the surface, paler than before.
“I’m going to have to leave if you keep doing that. I can’t look at blood right now.”
Tyler started to protest but gave up halfway through.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “I just need this to stop. I need this feeling to stop.”
Jessica desperately wanted to help him but she had no idea what to do. She drew him closer and put his head in her lap.
“It’ll be ok. We’re so close. We can leave soon,” she said softly.
“What do you mean?” asked Tyler.
“The semester’s almost over. We can go home soon,” said Jessica.
“What are you talking about? Do you really think it’s just going to end when the semester does? We can’t leave this. It’s everywhere. It’s everything.”
He became more agitated as he spoke.
“No, baby. We just need to make it out,” repeated Jessica.
“There is no out.”
Jessica felt herself getting angry. Of course there was an out. Why would he insist otherwise? She felt claustrophobic. The bed was so small. Too small for two people. She wanted to be there for Tyler, but his insistence against an exit was too much for her. He was slurring his words. At some point in the night, he had started mixing pills and alcohol. Her body was screaming for sleep. They kept talking. She closed her eyes. Her head felt heavy. She felt like they were both giant stone statue-heads on an empty beach, visible to each other yet far away. The lights of the TV flickered. The room was bare. His body was pressed against hers. It was almost four, whatever that meant.
Jessica felt like an actress in post-production, the world around her edited to simulate drowning for the viewer. It was 5am and Jessica was still awake. YouTube was autoplaying now. Tyler was asleep. Jessica tried to join him. She felt like every motion she made was made to fight off sinking. Her body felt so heavy. It felt large. It felt as if it was some forgotten corner landscape of some doomed trench war. The bed felt so small. Her body was pressed up against Tyler’s. She needed to sleep. She had an exam that morning. She needed her own bed. “Tyler,” she said softly.
He didn’t respond.
She repeated herself, louder.
He turned to her.
“Oh,” he said. “Right. It’s late.”
“I need to go back to my own room,” said Jessica.
“Please don’t go,” he said.
His eyes were pleading and desperate and glazed over.
“Baby, I need to sleep. I have an exam. I’ll be back tomorrow I promise,” she said.
“No. Please stay. I can’t be alone right now. Please.” he said.
“I love you,” she said.
In the three months they had been together she had never said that to him and he had never said it to her, but watching him fall so deeply into self-destruction, knowing that he really could kill himself, made her realize that she did love him. But she couldn’t be there for him, not right now. She needed to sleep.
***
It was 10am and she was in a classroom taking her last exam. She felt calm as she wrote her answers. She turned in the exam and walked out into the clear December day. She could walk into the day, into the brisk air and sunlight. Nothing compelled her to go back to the building. Nothing compelled her but she knew she had to go back. She was done with class. All that was left were a few last days of dead space between the last exam and the official end of the semester, when her parents would come pick her up. She hadn’t spoken to her parents in weeks. She had barely thought of them. She hadn’t told them what was happening in the building, all the suicides, and the school must have been doing a good enough job keeping it under wraps because they didn’t ask. But now that the semester was nearly over, her time in the building coming to an end, she thought about her parents and how excited she was to see them. Still, she had to make it the next few days. She couldn’t leave the building until it was time.
She went back to her room and slept until the following evening. She checked her phone. No messages. She messaged Tyler. No response. She walked down to the cafeteria on the second floor. There were only a few scattered students eating, even though it was dinner time. The staff was a skeleton crew and only a few stations were open. Half of the chairs were still stacked atop the tables. She wandered around trying to find something that looked good. She settled on rice. She was so hungry that the idea of food repulsed her. She sat down to eat it and checked her messages. Still no response from Tyler. A fluorescent light twitched overhead. She checked again. She played a word game on her phone. She read the headlines of a feminist-gossip site but didn’t open any stories. A pop star was pregnant with a rapper’s child. The red carpet looks at the People’s Choice Awards had been “just ok.” Two enterprising young women were working on a project to make fashion more environmentally sustainable. Jessica got the gist. She refreshed the page. No new stories had been published in the past five minutes. She avoided social media. She needed to be alone, even digitally. She went to a website to read glowing, practically sponsored, reviews for a superhero movie she had no intention of seeing. She thought about an episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation she had seen as a kid in which Lawrence Fishburne had said, in the autopsy room, standing over a corpse, that when he was having a bad day he read negative reviews for his favorite movies. For some reason she had never forgotten this scene, even though she had long forgotten everything else about the show, even the graphic deaths and mutilated bodies that she, looking back, should definitely not have seen at such a young age. They could have fucked her up, but fortunately the only long-term effect of the show was hate reading movie reviews when she didn’t have the energy for anything else. There was a TV in the corner of the cafeteria playing CNN on silent. She watched it for a moment. Nothing they talked about seemed real to her. She checked her phone again. Still no response. She let herself be worried. She went back to her room with an apple and a second helping of rice in a clear plastic container. She called Tyler. It went straight to voicemail. She walked over to his room. She knocked on the door. There was no answer. He had given her a key last month, a sort of romantic emergency gesture. She went in.
Tyler was sprawled out on his bed. He looked asleep but not quite.
“Tyler?” said Jessica softly. “You ok?”
There was no response.
She repeated his name, a little louder.
And then again a little louder.
No response.
She turned on the light. She felt her pupils contract. Tyler was pale. His head lolled back, and his mouth was agape. Jessica was scared to get any closer.
“Tyler,” she said. “Please wake up.”
She had her hand on his shoulder and was shaking him. He remained motionless. She leaned in towards him, hoping to feel his breath on her face, but there was nothing. She called 911 but she knew it was too late. She wasn’t sure if he was trying to kill himself or had just overdosed. It probably didn’t matter. The line between partial and total oblivion seemed pretty thin these days.
She sat with him until the paramedics arrived and pronounced him dead on the spot. She noticed she was crying and then she noticed she wasn’t crying. Her face was numb. She understood what Tyler had meant. There was no way out, not really. Nothing could ever be created or destroyed, only changed. There was an almost thermodynamic impossibility of suicide. Tyler had not ended his pain, only transferred it to her.
Still, she wanted to die. She knew that now. Her desire for exsanguination was desperate, total. It hummed outside of her, in anticipation of a ghost body larger than her own. In one sense she was in the shower now, her wet clothes clinging heavily to her body. In another sense she wasn’t here at all. In one sense she was feeling the water against her skin; in another sense her body wasn’t even her own, just as her death would not be her own. She had no self to kill. Regardless, she knew what she had to do.
There was a world where Casey was banging on the bathroom door. There was a world where Jessica had placed a chair under the doorknob to keep Casey from being able to open it. There was this world but it wasn’t the one Jessica was in. She screamed, a desperate wounded howl that cut across from one world to the next, its watery echo bouncing around the room blending with the sound of the shower. Steam was filling every world. She cut across her thigh. It felt sharp, clarifying. She watched the blood spill from her leg and mix with the water as it circled the drain, either the blood diluted or the water tainted. She cut again and then again, until her leg was covered in long deep cuts. She knew that if only she could cut deep enough, she could reach her femoral artery, and if she cut that she could bleed out in minutes, quicker even than if she cut her wrists, but she hesitated every time she went to make the decisive cut.
She could barely hear Casey shouting. It was just her and the shower and her knife. She was alone. She was alone in a universal and infinitesimal point, narrowed to an atom. Narrowed to an atom and split.
A person can be divided from another person. A person can be divided from themselves. A person can be divided and divided and divided again, towards the point of nullification, towards the point where there is nothing left to divide from but zero, the point, where, against the laws of mathematics, against the laws of nature, there is nothing to divide by but zero, where all that is left is rending the unrendable.
A split atom.
A loss of perspective, maybe.
Death, either way. Suicide.
Jessica, glassy-eyed. The sound of the shower, the steady pulse of water hitting tile, the creaks of the pipes, the echoes. She heard them. She heard it and for an endless unrendable moment she stared serenely into the continuous stream as it circled the drain.
— Jacob Stovall was born in Chicago but raised in Massachusetts and Tennessee. He has recently moved back to Chicago.