بخش 03 - فصل 17

17

Brady became fascinated with suicide at the age of twelve, while reading Raven, a true-crime book about the mass suicides in Jonestown, Guyana. There, more than nine hundred people—a third of them children—died after drinking fruit juice laced with cyanide. What interested Brady, aside from the thrillingly high body count, was the lead-up to the final orgy. Long before the day when whole families swallowed the poison together and nurses (actual nurses!) used hypodermics to squirt death down the throats of squalling infants, Jim Jones was preparing his followers for their apotheosis with fiery sermons and suicide rehearsals he called White Nights. He first filled them with paranoia, then hypnotized them with the glamour of death.

As a senior, Brady wrote his only A paper, for a half-assed sociology class called American Life. The paper was called “American Deathways: A Brief Study of Suicide in the U.S.” In it he cited the statistics for 1999, then the most recent year for which they were available. More than forty thousand people had killed themselves during that year, usually with guns (the most reliable go-to method), but with pills running a close second. They also hung themselves, drowned themselves, bled out, stuck their heads in gas ovens, set themselves on fire, and rammed their cars into bridge abutments. One inventive fellow (this Brady did not put into his report; even then he was careful not to be branded an oddity) stuck a 220-volt line up his rectum and electrocuted himself. In 1999, suicide was the tenth leading cause of death in America, and if you added in the ones that were reported as accidents or “natural causes,” it would undoubtedly be right up there with heart disease, cancer, and car crashes. Most likely still behind them, but not far behind.

Brady quoted Albert Camus, who said, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”

He also quoted a famous psychiatrist named Raymond Katz, who stated flatly, “Every human being is born with the suicide gene.” Brady did not bother to add the second part of Katz’s statement, because he felt it took some of the drama out of it: “In most of us, it remains dormant.”

In the ten years between his graduation from high school and that disabling moment in the Mingo Auditorium, Brady’s fascination with suicide—including his own, always seen as part of some grand and historic gesture—continued.

This seed has now, against all the odds, fully blossomed.

He will be the Jim Jones of the twenty-first century.