The stories in this volume compose FAB = -FBA, the second volume of SUM FLUX. See more stories, and check out the authors featured in this edition here.
It was started by a student sick of death. Suicide, that is, not death itself. Death she understood as much as any young person could. A site dedicated to giving notice, DeathBook was where you announced your intention. It wasn’t designed to stop anyone; Sanjana was too angry for that and she believed everyone owned the rights to their life; if you wanted to go, you could go, but she believed in a duty of care, that suicide ripped a hole in the fabric of the lives left behind, and she was sick of the shock.
There’d been a spate of suicides at her University, more than anywhere else in the country, not a record she wanted. It wasn’t listed on the prospectus, nor printed on the leaflets at UCAS fairs but it was talked about in halls and cafes, at the back of lecture theatres, and it got into the press. Her University became known for it. Don’t send your children here, was the message behind the headlines and, We’re killing ourselves the thought in Sanjana’s head as she stood at her stall at Fresher’s week, wondering which of the fresh faces would be next. Two in her first year. Five in her second. Three this year already. Ten lives that would never see twenty-five, never know how life can change, that this was rarely it. Ten families devastated, ten sets of parents who’d never live again, not fully, not the way they did when their children were bouncing through their door at the end of term dumping their dirty washing and problems on the kitchen floor. Life grew around their grief. Their grief never changed one bit. That’s what they told her as the years and bodies went by.
Her own parents, who were jolly and happy and had their own woes but had never known the violence of a young life unexpectedly cut short by its own hand, worried she was becoming obsessed but Sanjana, who felt in these years she’d grown up faster than was good for her, who’d gone to study biology not suicide but had learnt too much about both, told them that the headlines screaming WHY? and a general air amongst University governance that it wasn’t their fault, wasn’t good enough. No one was facing it. No one was taking action. So she bought the domain name and set it up.
The rules of DeathBook were simple: anyone wishing to take their own life must post a ninety day notice. Their contact list, shared at registration, will be notified. They will be given access to a therapist. They can change their mind at any time. The tagline was Less Statement. More Conversation.
University mental health services were on to her immediately. She was ordered to take it down. But nowhere on the site did it encourage students to kill themselves, nor to have suicidal ideation. It wasn’t glorified, minimised or dramatized. It said clearly in the FAQ that the point was to be open to discussion, to give loved ones the chance to say goodbye, and the opportunity to say anything else that came to mind. Sanjana argued, when hauled up in front of the head of faculty, that it wasn’t her right to tell others how to live or when to die, but she believed that those ten already dead would be devastated to know of the carnage they’d left behind, that they wouldn’t have wanted that, and that yes, for some of them, it might even have changed their minds. She was threatened with expulsion. She got her tech friends to take it underground. Which is where Tom found it.
Tom wanted to die. He’d had enough. He didn’t fit, he never had, he’d only been here to please his parents, that’s how it felt after nineteen years, that he’d come here to make them happy and he’d done that and now he wanted out. He loved them, they were good, average, annoying parents who worried about his homework, then his smoking, then his grades but pleasing them wasn’t enough to fill his day. No way. He needed more. He felt empty. His head hurt from trying to think, and his body from the billion pinpricks of living in a world he wasn’t built for. That was the conclusion he’d come to.
School had been okay, friends were good, he’d been in with the surfers and smokers, they’d looked down on the Popular group and liked it that way, at school prom they’d worn their board shorts. He’d had girlfriends, that wasn’t it, either. Girls liked him. They ran their hands through his floppy blonde hair and said he wasn’t like the other boys, he was nice. He'd kissed them. He’d had sex eventually after much fumbling and false starts, he didn’t think he was good looking but he wasn’t ugly either, he was average like his parents, like his life. And it wasn’t that he expected life to be exciting, thought it should be more than it was, he felt he understood that this was it. That was the problem. He didn’t like what he saw or how it made him feel. It was too harsh. Too loud. Too upsetting. He was tired of shielding. He was frightened it would never end.
As he stared at the screen he wondered who would be the first to ask him, How should it be, then? He didn’t have an answer to that. He’d been asking himself the same question for a very long time, and all he’d come up with was, Quiet.
He signed up. He shared his contacts. He posted his notice.
The first to ring was his mother. “Is this some sort of joke?”
“Hi mum.”
“You’re to take it down immediately.”
“I’ve got ninety days.”
“Your father’s coming to get you.”
His old friends from school rang. They told him he was being a dick, and to get laid, and to at least wait till after the summer, they were going to Cornwall. He got messages from people he hadn’t seen since primary. The algorithm worked like a genealogy site, shared contacts became a web of lost and found. A guy he’d met on work experience said Yo man c u there. Tom didn’t answer. This wasn’t a club. He didn’t want to align with anyone.
His father turned up the next day.
“Get in the car.” He was shaking with anger, his tall frame rattling like a greenhouse in high winds. His glasses were smudged. He wiped them on his cardigan.
“I’ve got a tutorial.”
“Tutorials don’t matter,” replied his father.
You’ve changed your tune, thought Tom.
The drive home took three hours. His father wore gloves, a soft brown leather, raised seams, they gripped the black steering wheel as if tightness would keep his son safe. Tom expected conversation, but there was silence followed by shouting followed by silence.
“After everything we’ve done for you.”
Silence.
“Your mother’s beside herself.”
Silence.
“I’ve never wanted to call you ungrateful, Tom, but this is what this. A sick joke. As if we deserve it.”
Silence all the way home.
At the dining room table, the three of them grouped as if it was a meeting, which it was, a family meeting – but they talked as if Tom wasn’t there.
“He’s not in his right mind,” said his mother, her face streaked with pain, her hair with grey. He’d tried to comfort her but she wasn’t having it. She’d shouted, Only if you take it down. But he wouldn’t. She said, her eyes on his father, “No one in their right mind wants to kill themselves.”
Was that true? Tom thought as his parents discussed him. Were the state and the action mutually exclusive? He felt sane, he felt clear, he felt calm like he did on his surfboard, a gentle rhythm of waves, a wide open sky. He wasn’t depressed unless he’d been born depressed. Nothing dreadful had happened, they’d been through that, his parents stumbling over words like, trauma and cannabis; the interrogation of, What’s made you think like this? was coming to an end, his father was choking on phrases meant to help, a series of condemnations; drugs, social media, his mother, a generation enfeebled, in his day they got on with it, what was wrong with them.
“I don’t fit.”
“Don’t fit?” cried his father. “Don’t fit? What’s that supposed to mean?”
And his mother said, “Don’t shout at him, love,” even though she’d been shouting all morning.
He wondered if he was a sociopath, how his parents’ sorrow didn’t touch him the way it was supposed to. “I don’t want you to suffer. I love you very much. That’s why I’m letting you know because I don’t want to upset you.”
“Upset us?” They shouted together.
“DeathBook says you own the rights to your life, but not to cause violence to others.”
“Don’t you quote that place at me,” cried his mother as if it was a city Tom had come from and to which he would return, a place that had stolen him.
“I love you mum,” said Tom, holding out his hand to hers.
He promised if they let him be he would come home on the eighty-ninth day. He promised if they called social services he’d jump off a bridge so they better not. He asked them to try and understand. They said the same to him.
Sanjana met him at the station.
“They want me to see the therapist,” said Tom. It was the first time they’d met in person. He noticed her freckles.
“So do I,” she replied.
For eleven weeks he went every Tuesday afternoon, straight from lectures on family law, corporate law, trust law and criminal, to sit in the warm, small office of a warm, small man who listened to why Tom wanted to die. For eleven weeks he discussed his rights as opposed to those of his family. He was afraid of the act but not what came after. He was afraid of the suffering on his parents’ face but far more of the suffering he was under.
“How do you know it won’t change?” asked the therapist.
“I can’t turn the world down,” said Tom. “There’s no volume dial or dimmer switch. It’s how it is, and how I am; how can either of those be different?”
“And you don’t want to find out?” asked his therapist.
After every session Sanjana met him to drink tea in a garden where birds sang above the noise of the city, a quiet café of blue metal chairs, the tables round and wonky. Earl Grey served in mismatching pots. Sobriety was a commitment Tom had thought up by himself.
“I don’t want to die drunk,” he said. “I don’t want my last breaths to be hungover, my last weeks to be fogged. Who’d want that?”
And she marvelled at his clarity, and wished she’d met him earlier. “Isn’t death the same kind of escape, though? Like a binge you never wake up from?”
“I’m in pain,” said Tom, “I’m not stupid. If I knew I had to stay I’d be drunk all the time.”
“I can’t imagine it,” said Sanjana, and she couldn’t. Looking at his wind-whipped hair, how the sunshine glinted off the rings on his fingers, she tried to find the unbearable state written in his brown eyes, the line of his jaw but he looked like a surfer boy in from the beach, as if sand would fall from his shoulders, as if his mouth would taste of salt.
“It’s not me that’s unwell, it’s the world.” It was the most truth he’d spoken since he was a boy and had said to his mother, I don’t like it here, meaning everything outside of him but she’d thought he’d meant the supermarket and given him a juice box, tearing the straw with her teeth and piercing the silver hole while looking for burgers in the freezer section. The sun was in his eyes and he squinted. “I told my dad I couldn’t handle the canteen and he told me to get a grip.”
There were those who called it a brain attack, others who ideated, but Tom was the first to explain, “I’m suffering.”
And Sanjana, who’d only been thinking of her own pain, woke up to his. “So bad you want to die?”
“It’s unbearable,” said Tom.
“And if you knew how much you’d be missed, would you stand it?”
“That’s blackmail,” said Tom.
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“But you want me to stay.”
“I want your pain to stop.”
“That’s better,” said Tom. “So do I.”
They went to the library together. Tom had his end of term essay to write, and Sanjana to study for her finals.
On the eighty-ninth day his parents came to get him.
“Please come with us,” said his father.
He’d handed in his essay. He’d thought about death and how to do it. He’d wished there was a black hole to jump into, something clean that would leave no mess.
“I don’t want you to suffer,” he said to his mother, turning around in the front seat to look at her in the back, aged twenty years in twelve weeks.
“Too late for that,” said his father still gripping the wheel, glasses smudged, cardigan shapeless. A lawyer, old and frozen, he’d spent seventy-five years trying to live, and eighty-nine days trying to shut DeathBook down, have Sanjana arrested, sue someone, anyone, he’d called it a terrorist cell. He’d sent writs to the Chancellor, written letters to The Times, raised a storm in his hourglass world.
“Can’t you let me be free?” Tom said to his father.
“You are free,” his mother’s hand on his shoulder, gripping and not letting go. They’d discussed locking him up. They’d considered the life he’d have then, how he’d hate them but he’d be alive, what was wrong with that picture. It could be a passing phase, it might not be.
“It’s not your fault, mum,” he laced his fingers through hers. “Or yours, dad. Neither of you have done anything wrong. I want you to be happy.”
“We could never be happy,” said his mother as the weight of her arm unlaced her fingers and it fell heavy to her side.
“We’d blame ourselves,” said his father, as if he hadn’t heard him.
And his mother was crying again, crying like she’d never stopped since the day the message came, how she’d gone from shock to guilt to anger to despair, helplessness to outrage, a circling of horror that had almost taken her with it, but she couldn’t die. How her shame had poured out to her husband and her closest friends and then to friends she hardly knew because she couldn’t contain it, the panic. How she’d blown her top at her husband’s blame, made him go to therapy where he’d talked of his pain and abandonment, how they’d grown closer in the months that had passed while their beloved child carried on his study as if none of this was happening, as if it was a picnic planned, or a holiday, how she wanted to shake him and hold him and make him understand he couldn’t do this to them, he couldn’t do this to himself, it wasn’t right, life would get better, he was only a child, how could he know what the future held, he wouldn’t always feel this way, it would change. How she wanted, more than anything in the world, for him to live.
“Is there nothing we can say that will change your mind?” she said as they drew up outside their house.
Day ninety dawned bright and clear. Tom drew back the curtains of his childhood room. He knew his parents waited for him downstairs. And Sanjana, who’d arrived by train at the last minute, had said, Please. His father had said, Is this her? as if he’d hit her, and his mother, so usually bright and ready with cake had turned her back. But they’d let her stay. Tom had insisted. And this morning, bright and clear, she was there at the table, a pot of tea, his favourite bowl, his preferred cereal, the offer of eggs and bacon.
“We can’t let you go.” His mother barred the door.
“I’ll call the police.” His father held up the phone.
“I’ll miss you.” Sanjana bit her lip.
But the three months of listening and talking and being believed had done something to the inside of Tom’s body, the head that cried chaos, the world that was too loud.
“If you help me run DeathBook I’ll live.” He topped up his tea with some milk.
“That’s blackmail,” said his father.
“It’s madness,” said his mother.
“It’s a good idea,” said Sanjana.
Tom nodded.
 | A guest post by
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How could you know so well how Tom could feel? How do we spot this in our children? How do we turn the noise down? My heart is racing and also it feels like a fist is squeezing it hard.
There is so much here, written so compassionately -- and as always, powerfully. I'll be thinking about this one.