Painless

At night, when her mind wouldn’t rest, Norah would put the gun on her stomach and let the weight of it soothe her to sleep. She kept the barrel empty so that, if she wanted to, she could lay her fingers on trigger, the last place that Mark’s hand had touched. The last place that Thomas’s hand had touched. And, perhaps, the last place that Norah’s hand would touch.

Tonight, though, not even the gun could ease her mind. A torrent of thoughts crashed against her, one image after the next, rolling into her shore with relentless speed. She saw Thomas on the day he was born. She saw the pool of blood that spread across her bedroom the day that Mark died. She saw the vacant faces of parents and lovers and children who had lost someone or everyone to suicide. She saw her own hand, quaking, lifting the loaded gun toward her head. She saw her hand lowering the gun, over and over again. And she saw the fires and floods and droughts that had started it all.

Against the backdrop of these images, she found herself on her hands and knees, crawling away from her sleeping mat and toward the sack that had accompanied her across three continents. She reached inside and unzipped a pouch, felt her heart race as her fingers came in contact with cold, metal bullets. There’s no one left to miss me, Norah thought. And then, unexpectedly, the sound of her own voice pierced the night air, “But I would miss me.” She shook her head at the persistence of the survivalist instinct, even now. She slipped one of the bullets into the pocket of her pants and crawled back to the mat, letting herself relish for a moment in the way the spongey moss depressed beneath her weight.

It occurred to her then that she must be close now to where the first floods had rolled in, all those years ago. She remembered the way her father used to tell it, almost like a legend. They said that the currents were so strong that even the whales were at its mercy, his voice rang in her ears. No building could withstand its force. Forests were leveled. No one even had time to drown; the water crushed their bodies with its force. And we knew that we could never let this happen again. But, as Norah would learn, no one could stop the floods from coming, just as no one would be able to stop the fires or the droughts. What they could stop, though, was some of the suffering. As nature waged her rebellion against human industry, the doomed species made use of its remarkable ingenuity one more time. An elegant solution, really: a highly infectious virus modified to disrupt the body’s ability to feel pain. And, as a protection mechanism, each person would receive a tiny, silver bead, to be worn in the ear, that would emit a penetrating hum any time it sensed that the body was in pain. So, the fires and floods and droughts would come, but no one would feel an ounce of pain.

Now, under a dome of stars, Norah could feel the hum of the bead against her chest, so constant that it had created a spot of warmth on her skin. She kept the bead inside a heart-shaped locket, preferring to feel it rather than hear it. After all, she thought, you’re supposed to feel pain, not hear it. As she looked at the constellations above her, she imagined her bead like a black hole, the densest of all substances, drawing in and holding every ounce of pain that her body had ever experienced, ready to burst apart into a whole new universe. But what was to keep it from just getting denser and denser, sucking in more material until it sucked Norah in as well?

She felt it tugging, even now. Tugging the way it had tugged Mark and Thomas, dragging them into the center of their grief, where lived the knowledge that 10 billion people had already died, and the remaining billion seemed destined to perish at their own hands.

Norah felt for the bullet, gliding her fingers over it. She pictured the first time she’d kissed Mark, the way she’d spun around to hand him his ice cream cone and found him a little closer than she’d expected. And his lips were right there, pink and fleshy and his. So, she’d let her foot slip just a little closer, tilted her face up toward his, and pressed her lips gently into his. She remembered the way they’d both laughed when he gave her lip a seductive bite. She could see the way she’d smiled afterward, playfully sticking the tip of her tongue between her teeth and lifting her ice cream to shield her face, as if to say, “I’m thrilled and embarrassed, equal parts.”

She loaded the gun, taking a deep breath. She felt the weight of Thomas in her arms, only two years old. His plump, fiery cheeks tucked into the space between her shoulder and neck. She saw those cheeks again, twelve years later, the same rosy hue, but this time because he was holding a secret. And then the way his body slumped as the tension released, as he said those words, “Mom, I’m gay.” The way her face broke into a raucous grin when he finally said it. “I’m so, so proud, my love.”

She crawled toward the edge of the clearing, gun in her right hand. She wondered, for perhaps the thousandth time, if she would have loved Thomas more had she truly labored to birth him, had she felt the sweltering, undulating pain of the contractions. She wondered whether, if she had loved him more, he would he have stayed. She wondered whether, if she could feel the way her heart was shattering beneath her grief, she would be able to bear the fact that he had left.

Norah let herself slump against a tree. She admired the dark outline of its crown, this place of her death. Finally, her body would release her from her grief. Perhaps this is the body’s grief, the grief I have been waiting for, she thought. A letting of blood, a penance, an offering. Her body in exchange for her soul. She placed her hand on the ground, to feel it one more time, savoring its lusciousness. Then, she reached out into the moonlit night, where she could see the shimmering skins of wild blackberries, ripe and tender. She felt the mercy of it, the Earth giving of her body, this fruit of the forest. As if to say, I am only my body, so this is what I give.

I am my body, too, Norah responded. But my mind and my body are so far apart. Soul mates who cannot speak.

She placed the blackberry against her lips, feeling its warmth and softness. Then she slipped it into her mouth, pressing out the juice and letting the sweetness linger on her tongue. She tried, in these last moments, to be in her body as deeply as she could manage. Feeling the ground, tasting the nectar, smelling the soil. But she knew that her body held a thousand scars that she would never see, had shouldered a million burdens that she couldn’t feel, had broken under a lifetime of grief that her mind didn’t know how to release.

Then, in that void of her mind’s bodiless sorrow, Norah pulled the trigger. And her grief found its home.