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I had a friend named A. A was a suicide enthusiast.
If you interacted with A in any ordinary capacity, he was a perfectly normal human being, and he was never so foolish as to reveal his true nature to those he was not close with. Yet whenever the topic drifted even slightly toward anything related to death—not only suicide, but incidents, accidents, and all manner of mortality—a brief gleam would flicker in his eyes.
To forestall misunderstanding, let me say that A possessed the common sense to regard another person's death as a misfortune. However, owing to that singular devotion of his, it was simply unavoidable that a momentary expression—some mixture of faintly jealous admiration and a kind of ecstasy born of (what he himself would have called indecent) imagination—would surface for just an instant.
And in those spaces where he could speak of his love without restraint, his face would grow visibly flushed and his words would flow without end. ...Though hidden beneath his clothing, A's body was covered in dreadful scars from his many suicide attempts, and with each visit I paid him there were new wounds to be found. Without fail, he would tell me about every new injury with unabashed delight.
How and when A and I became friends, I have long since forgotten. Perhaps in the beginning A harbored no such predilection, or perhaps I had been somehow captivated by that fervent love of his—the one I ought to have found repulsive. In any case, it was certain that we were old friends.
A was a suicide enthusiast. He had attempted suicide by so many different methods that one might wonder whether any remained that he had not tried. Yet A was plagued by a dilemma.
"The fact that all I can ever manage are suicide attempts," so A would say, "I love suicide, make no mistake—but I find it rather objectionable that what follows is nothing but total darkness, silence... in a word, death. Just when I think I've finally consummated my desire, then 'death do us part,' and after that I can never attempt suicide again.
"This is a grave problem indeed. That's why I must trouble C (another friend of A, and a physician of what one might fairly call genius-level skill) to pull me back before it's too late. But I don't think this arrangement is good for either me or C."
I was fond of travel. I often journeyed around the world.
A had for a long time led a life in which he scarcely ever left even his own home, so he enjoyed hearing ordinary travel stories well enough—but whenever I happened to touch upon anything death-related in the local legends and rumors I had gathered, he would invariably grow all the more delighted.
One such time, having heard an interesting account in a distant country, I shared it with A.
"It's called reincarnation," I said, "they believe that the soul does not perish after death. Instead, after a certain interval, it is reborn into a new body. In most cases, all memories of the previous life are lost."
"In other words—there are those for whom they are not?" A's eyes lit up in that peculiar way of his.
"There are people who claim to possess memories of their past life, whether vaguely or vividly. I find it hard to believe, myself."
"No... I believe it." A took on a contemplative air and said so.
From that point on, no matter what I said to him, A's mind was elsewhere, and there was nothing for it but to leave for the day.
According to C—who shared A's home owing to his special role—A had begun some manner of dubious research starting from that very day.
He devoured foreign books procured from who knows where with a dictionary, attempted to concoct chemicals, performed what resembled rituals—there was no doubt that the extraordinary passion he had until then reserved solely for suicide was now being channeled into this new pursuit.
He appeared, in every sense of the phrase, to have found in this research a reason to live.
A continued his research for several months. So thoroughly did he pour his heart and soul into it that he gradually seemed to grow somewhat gaunt, though not to a degree that would critically harm his health.
A slight nutritional deficiency had nothing whatsoever to do with A's death.
A died abruptly. It was suicide by jumping from a great height. Nearby residents reported hearing A scream in the dead of night—"I've found it...! I've finally found the difference...!"—followed by a sound, as of something being crushed and shattered, that they would rather have never heard. They heard this sound twice.
It goes without saying that A was a suicide enthusiast, and so he must have wished to prolong his final pleasure as long as possible. C, who had always been summoned beforehand and had made it his custom to stand by at the ready to resuscitate A, had apparently been drugged with some substance; he was sleeping soundly in his bed when the police, arriving for the investigation, shook him awake.
Even those who knew nothing of his extraordinary predilection seemed to have harbored a certain nameless dread of A, and the manner of his death was abnormal besides, and A himself had never been one for socializing—so the funeral was attended by very few. When I peered into A's face alongside C, I found he wore an expression not so much of peace as of rapture—a faint, ecstatic smile.
Beside me, I heard C murmur, "Was this really what you wanted, A...?"
As for myself, I could not decide whether to grieve for A, who had ended his life by his own hand, or to be glad for him—for death by external causes, whether at the hands of another or by illness, was the thing he despised most of all.
Some years later, I married, and a child was born. But the child was stillborn. The bewildered physician at first hesitated to show me the infant, but when I insisted, he reluctantly obliged.
The baby had apparently rotated a great deal inside the mother's womb, and the umbilical cord had wound itself tightly around its neck. This alone sufficed as the cause of death—but the problem was the baby itself.
The infant was gripping the umbilical cord coiled around its neck, and rather than trying to loosen it, appeared to be pulling it tighter still. And the crowning detail was its expression: the baby wore a smile that made the blood run cold... a beaming, radiant smile.
I could not shake the feeling that I had seen this smile somewhere before, and to this day I am trying to banish a certain possibility that it suggests.
...A was a suicide enthusiast. He loved suicide with an abnormal, unwavering devotion.