The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [72]
Paranoia was the best way to deal with my situation, the most hopeful way to make any sense of the things that were happening to me. If there was no sense to what was happening, no intention, malignant or benign, then there was no hope. Would you rather be chased by a pack of wild dogs that were hungry or a pack of dogs that had a master who could, if he wanted to, call them off?
Warren himself was hauled off to the nut house a few weeks after I was. As I found out later, it wasn’t his first such trip. An interesting footnote to the whole thing is that he was picked up by the cops from the lawn in front of the Stevens Street apartment. The diagnosis: paranoid schizophrenic. A couple of weeks after that, a freak wandered in off the street claiming that God had led him there. He wrote poetry all over the wall and had busted out of a nut house somewhere in Ontario. I don’t know what it was about the Stevens Street apartment, but the odds of such a chain of events says something.
SUICIDE. The twenty-four-hour watch system broke down from time to time. I remember coming out of a long blank during which I had made love to every living thing, ingested gallons of every poison known to man, and called the devil’s bluff in a game a lot like seven-card stud in an end-of-the-world bacchanal. I was still moving but Simon and everyone else was out cold. I had relived the history of man and it was mostly ugly, brutal, and macho. My dead grandfather was congratulating me on winning. I was the toughest bastard who had ever lived and my forefathers were very proud of me.
I got up and went into the bathroom. The mirror in there was the best way to broadcast back to planet earth.
“First I’d like to thank all the billions of people, animals, and plants who made this possible.”
Looking in the mirror I could see that my body had become a composite of all bodies. Half my face was Asian, an arm and a leg were black. But it was more subtle than that. Everything that had ever lived had contributed their best cell to make what I now called me.
I tried to open the bathroom door but it wouldn’t budge, and I finally understood what I had to do. My life had been spiraling toward this place and moment, pulled closer and closer to the vortex, and now I was there. I cheerfully drew myself a nice hot tub, found the razor blades they hadn’t hidden very well and a gallon jug of Clorox. I wasn’t unhappy or bitter, I was humming tunes from “My Fair Lady.” I thought it would be lots of fun to see if I really could kill myself, but Simon interrupted my little party before I could decide whether it would be better to slash my wrists and then drink the Clorox or vice versa.
At other times suicidal longings came from desperate unhappiness, but everything was so confused I couldn’t do a decent job of it. I’d become convinced that something like sitting in a certain chair, looking crosseyed at a psychedelic poster while I chanted Om and clicked my heels together, would do the trick. It became very hard for me to tell when I was committing suicide and when I wasn’t.
I had thought a fair amount about suicide before I went nuts. It was often in connection with thinking about what sort of positive move I could make toward solving the problems of the world. The only way out of the mess the world was in that I could see was to have fewer people. Maybe killing myself and thereby making one less mouth to feed, one less body to clothe, one less excuse for the New York Times to kill trees, would do more good than anything else.
I believe now that if I placed a twelve-gauge shotgun in my mouth and pulled the trigger, I would cease to have consciousness. I find it a comforting belief. Much of the terror of then was that I had done that or the equivalent and it hadn’t worked.
Before the crackup, suicidal impulses had been prodded by my mortality: Since some day, why