So, despite my sore body and my cut face, I was probably better off out here in America than at home with Fibo rolling the breakfast dice. I headed west out of Cincinnati and found Oxford, Ohio before heading north and into Indiana, and eventually into a town called Richmond. Sitting at a red light in what appeared to be a town, like so many others in America, dying from the inside and being reborn on its edges, a father and son crossed the street in front of me with fishing poles in their hands. The face of Morton Petes came to me as it often does. Did he like to fish? Maybe with his dad? I didn’t know. And then a gentle honk of a horn suggested that I should acknowledge the now green traffic light.
I decided to pull over and get my head straight. I heard a church bell ring and it reminded me of Sundays as a child. Sliding on the vinyl back seat of my dad’s Buick as he cornered like a racecar driver (for my benefit) on the way to church. I thought for a second about church, and then looked at the one next to me. St. Mary’s. In the absence of the dice, but in the spirit of my own Sunday habit, I pulled out a penny. Heads, I went into the church, tails I headed north. Abe Lincoln thought it best that I get back to the house of God, not surprising considering his character. I complied.
An hour later my Ford sighed as I gave it gas and we were on our way to Detroit, now holding a small flyer and a bit of unease. It read “YOUR LIFE IS WORTH FIGHTING FOR. Suicide prevention hotline.” The number had a Detroit exchange. I had been sitting in the last pew of the Catholic church, when I found the hotline ad. I was looking for something in the church, something to calm the feelings from my past. For some reason, today Morton was on my mind more than usual.
Morton Petes was a gifted student, if a bit of an irritant. I can say that despite everything that happened, because it’s true. He was. As a grad student at MIT, I worked as a teacher’s assistant for a differential equations class. This was complex math for undergrads and many saw it as a “make or break” course. Looking at Morton, you might have guessed it might break him, but I didn’t think so. Teacher’s assistants at MIT have open office hours. During these two hours a day, students asked me their specific questions. Morton was a regular at my office hours.
Typical undergrads I assist are around twenty years old. Morton was not an exception in age, but he was in appearance. He looked like he was in his late forties. His messy brown hair was graying and his tall body was thick with what looked like middle-aged decline. His face was often patched with red blotches, but his eyes were the great equalizer in his appearance. Bright, green and alive they could have come from someone else. They didn’t seem at home in this prematurely aging frame. I’d watch him work, and help him along to the complex solutions with a mix of hints and suggestions, and the rest was his own work. The work he did was solid, but it came rarely. Much of the time, I thought I was helping him with things that he already knew. So why was he coming to my office hours every day? He’d often change the subject.
“Do you know that Catholics believe in heaven, hell and purgatory?”
“I do, Morton,” I’d replied, ready for a subject change myself, but finding his timing annoyingly predictable. It was just before the hardest part of the particular problem.
“I was raised Catholic.”
“Oh, a follower of the Vatican, excellent.”
“Well, I was raised …”
“Did you know that suicide victims are not allowed into the esteemed Catholic heaven? Does that seem fair to you?”
“Morton, I’m not sure that that is really the sort of topic that we …”
“We deal in math every day. It’s logical. Solutions are the result of the scenario we’ve arranged. One leads to the next, correctly. Yet some lives lead to solutions that are no less true, no less logically derived by the system that is life. Sometimes the solution is that it is time to die. For some of us, it’s the only choice. X = death”
“Well, the patterns of life are still within our control, Morton.”
“Are they? I don’t know. With the way that I’ve been feeling lately, don’t be too surprised, Theo, if one day I’m heading off to your Catholic hell.”
“Morton, are you suggesting that you are considering something drastic? Because the school has counselors.”
“I believe we were about to look at these equations, Theo.”
The church was surprisingly calming to me. The design fit well with my personal sense of aesthetics. It wasn’t cluttered with unnecessarily ornate knick-knacks. The stained glass had deep shades of red and blue and the walls were plain white. It was clean. Simple. Like faith. A concept I found intensely predictable. In the absence of the facts, people will create a solution. That solution should manifest itself in something greater than themselves and something with a happy ending for the righteous, and another for those who stray. Life was valuable. End your own and you’ve strayed. I looked into the slot in the back of the pew in front of me, the corner of the small flyer peaked out. I tugged at it and found the suicide prevention number. On the back of it, though, was written a name. Mike Vestal. Yes, faith is predictable, but God, if you believe in Him or not, now He could be random.
“It just doesn’t seem right to me that the people in the deepest despair, should be met with the harshest ending,” Morton had said in another study session, weeks later.
“It’s a device to keep people from killing themselves, Morton. Does it surprise you that the harshest of punishments should be threatened for things a religion least wants its members to do? Suicide is embarrassing to a religion.”
“Hell is more than just a threat, Theo.”
And so, my conversations with Morton went on for weeks. His obsession with the fate of suicide victims grew. Another thread that grew was his own talk of depression. Yet something wasn’t right. I looked at Morton and I let my mind relax. My memories of the things he’s said came back to me, words, quantifiable degrees of emotion, and I saw no pattern that led to anything drastic. Nothing. It didn’t end there. The main thing that kept me from fully believing his threats of suicide were his eyes. They entered into the math in my head as a large, nearly infinite quantity of life. With them in the pattern, nothing he said led anywhere drastic. I believed in my ability. I believed that human beings could easily be quantified, that patterns formed and that they then could be predicted. My talent told me Morton was bluffing. I was wrong.
I passed through Toledo on the raised highway near its automotive billboards and across the Maumee river and into Michigan. The car plants started to surround me like giant land masses. I laughed and felt proud to be driving a Ford. I rolled on through downtown Detroit, where little can be seen from the highway, and into its northern suburbs to a place called Royal Oak. I spent a few days exploring the area, avoiding a certain address, but on Wednesday I looked it up and drove there. The address on the anti-suicide flyer.
Detroit is a city that very well typifies the concept of “White Flight.” That is, as the center of a town begins to decline for economic reasons, and certain less privileged classes find areas more affordable to live, the affluent class moves. Usually outward and toward the suburbs. Detroit has a series of lines that mark distance from the town center. These lines are roads called, appropriately, Six-Mile, Seven-Mile, Eight-Mile, etc. depending on their distance from the center. After the race riots of 1968, Detroit’s upper class fled so far north as to be quantified there, Eight Miles from down town. And so the line was drawn. There are, of course, exceptions to this pattern, but sometimes we need to speak in terms of the average and not the exceptions. The whole process of flight wasn’t unexpected given the model and the variables that had been presented. Detroit was fighting the pattern even now and many claimed it was losing.
Royal Oak was far from the center, though, and was a pleasant mix of urban-styled life and unique stores with just a hint of suburban isolation. The roads formed square blocks, a sign of earlier American urban planning, and the streets were tree lined. The effect was a pleasing environment, even in front of the suicide prevention center.
I walked through the center’s glass door, with stickers placed in several locations, each supporting a cause in keeping with their aims. Amnesty, Humanity and the like. I approached a receptionist and started to ask to speak to the Mike Vestal. I realized, though, that she was currently on the phone.
“Are you sure that that’s what your father meant when he said that? Tell me how you felt after that …”
She was not a receptionist. She just had the desk closest to the door. I fell for a stereotype. Note that, Theo, I told myself. She motioned I could come in, and so I did. And I wandered to a desk with the name Mike Vestal marked on it. I sat at a chair by the empty desk and waited.
Morton Petes killed himself three years ago this June 11th. The police kept most of the details secret, but they were clear on the outcome. Morton apparently slit his wrists while in his bathtub in his Cambridge apartment. He was found three days later as he had no roommates, just a landlord who periodically stopped by and was alarmed at the break in their routine. Then Morton was gone. But I remained. He suggested he was ready to die, but I didn’t see it as likely. Improbably. Not within the pattern. After that, things began to fall apart for me.
“Hi, sorry I was out, can I help you?” The man asked as he got into his chair.
I brought my head back from the June memory and turned to face a smiling man. He had a kind face and wore thick glasses with black frames. His hair was black and curly and he gave the impression of being both sensitive and artistic. He was probably in his early thirties. He held out his hand.
“Mike Vestal”
“Hi, Theo Burnkey,” accepting the hand.
“Are you alright, Theo? Is there something you’d like to talk about? You look like you’ve been in a fight!”
“Yeah, I was more the observer of a fight waged on me, but it’s all fine.”
I spoke with Mike for a little while about the nature of suicide. I told him I’d been close to it, and that it was a big part of why I wasn’t home in Boston right now. He explained they offered support to people that were near suicide as well as those contemplating it. I assured him that I was only in the former category. I told him about the flyer I found in the church in Richmond.
“That’s funny, well just a coincidence, but we deal with a church nearby named after St. Mary as well. My flyers are often in their pews from what I understand. The priest there, Father John, is an old friend of mine.”
“Any idea how it might have made it to Richmond?”
“No. It’s not impossible that someone could have carried it there. Just unlikely. Richmond is a four hour drive and not on the main highway. Do you know the statistics for things like that?”
“I do. Too well.”
I left the office without further elaborating on Morton or the way that I was at least a part of the equation that led to his death. I held onto the brochure, though, and told Mike it should not be surprising if he hear from me soon. I told him I had more to say when I was ready.
I stood for a moment at the doorway of the center just before leaving. I thought about the hell that suicide victims went to. I was a mathematical man, and a scientist. I didn’t put a lot of credence in hell or the devil. In fact, if my spirit had any room for the plausibility of God, it had much less for that of the devil. Evil just always struck me as the opposite of good. Positive numbers had negative counterparts, but they only described how far you were from zero. They weren’t bad or wrong, just negative. If there were no hell, though, then where had Morton gone? Just into the Cambridge ground? I wasn’t sure, but I put the small flyer into my wallet for safe keeping.
I walked back to the streets of Royal Oak just as the sun emerged from some Great Lakes cloud-cover, turning grey back into blue. As the sun hit me, though, I started to become dizzy. I approached my car and when I got to it, I had to lean against it. My head was rushing through patterns I had not suggested to it. I could see the highway maps of the area, Detroit to Chicago to Minneapolis and on to Nebraska and Colorado. Like links in a chain. The lines of the highways wiggled and glowed, and I sensed a pattern on the verge of forming. It wasn’t clear yet, but I felt an urgent need to get to Chicago, and that if I didn’t soon the rest of the numbers may never align. Perhaps it could only become clear once I joined the equation. If Barbara Arnoff were the B in the pattern of the missing, perhaps I was the T in another. Maybe I had to be in place for the rest of it to be revealed. And so I climbed back in to my Mustang, its white interior smelled familiar and like a surrogate home.
I-94 headed west and soon, so did I.
next chapter
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