A Bill

Friends, neighbours, townspeople and all passing and concerned. Quick explanation and friendly request: With the decline of transport it is as if places have grown further apart. In other words, the country has grown bigger, and there are fewer and fewer visitors, there is less and less moving about. There is little or no circulation at all. In isolated districts in the mountains and deep countryside there are settlements that no one has either visited or departed from for years. One wonders how the people survive in these inland islands, so far from the influence and the stewardship of more important places. What they eat; how they distract themselves; what exotic new diseases and mutations and neuroses and marital customs are arising among them. We talk about such things a lot in my circle, being naturally so much more interested in other people’s lives than we are our own.

Virtually the only thing that moves between settlements now which isn’t bearing decrees and heavy sentences is the wind. The wind which carries only seeds, viruses and rumours. The rumour grows now (and what do rumours grow into but facts we must act on?) of the first town, within our national borders, to be completely depopulated by suicide. Although to say ‘completely depopulated by suicide’ could never be strictly medically correct. Everyone with a serious and genuine interest in the subject realises and admits this. There must have been accidents too as well as ‘natural’, or at a stretch ‘misadventurous,’ deaths. Suicide in many cases can be as difficult as euthanasia to prove. The difference between a trip and a leap, a misdose and an overdose, an accidental crash and a deliberate collision with a wall, is often impossible to tell. There is also ‘slow suicide’, an intriguing category which is normally thought to fundamentally apply only to addicts but is broadening all of the time as research into the phenomenon increases. Slow suicide covers anyone who consciously or unconsciously commits an act, or commits an omission of an act, or allows any act or omission of an act to be committed against them, which might increase their chances of dying out before their natural span, in which case we are all suicides, differing from each other only in our choice of timescale, whether sudden or protracted. There is also the obvious question of whether the species as a whole is committing suicide, whatever percentage of its constituent members can be decided as doing so. Homo Sapiens Suicide. And then there is the cosmic or metaphysical realm to worry about. Is the human species an attempt by the planet, or even the universe as a whole, to completely do away with itself? Any such line of enquiry leads of course to cosmic intentions and cosmic intentions are God. Is humanity the suicide method of God? So, as you see, there is endless matter for discussion, debate and multi-disciplinary research. I am certain that this new suicide town will become an international centre for such.

The last person to die over there in Suicide Town was almost certainly a suicide. The majority of its final hundred or two-hundred-wave of deaths was done-by-self, no doubt. This is enough to qualify the town for its unique and everlasting position. The nearest rivals are thirty or forty suicides behind, and mass suicides in order to break records do not count in any case. There can be no two first places in matters of historical record. The town in question is the equivalent of the site of a famous miracle, or a religious apparition. Think of the city of Padua, or the village of Knock, and how, over the centuries, those two very holy, unique places, have benefited from their very holy uniqueness. Suicide Town will also be, no doubt, a place of dark pilgrimage providing much needed and long-lasting employment for thousands at least.

Here in our own morbid town of survivors, we have nothing so grand to distinguish us. Our town is full of doped-down morons with nothing to live for, unable to raise the enthusiasm to kill themselves. Most of our citizens, in the words of one local wit, have the potential of the average stone. Someone must pick us up, some force must budge us for any motion to occur. We go absolutely nowhere on our own. Can you blame the active sections of the youth for wanting out?

The high-achieving town of the suicides, which I shall not name (for fear of many things, including spectres and legal compromise) has within a very short time of space assumed a mystical reputation and an irresistible draw, like an Atlantis of shadows, among a certain few seekers, me among them. We want to set out for, and see with our own eyes, this overground catacomb where life is shuffled off with expertise and death has an appetite like a thousand pot-bellied pigs. The Paris of the mortuaries! The Venice of the mental plague! At long long last there is something out of the ordinary to reach for in the hope of being transformed. Which has finally given me—the adventurer of the second-hand settee—the excuse and the push that I needed. In just one veritable Blitzkrieg of a week I have given up Ponstan, porno, caffeine and weed. I’ll take no congratulations for what I should obviously not have gotten into in the first place, but you understand the state we are all in and the effort I have gone through all the same. Besides this, I have begged, borrowed, stolen and finally bought the last mule in our parish—the bookie’s own beloved mule of fortune.

Tomorrow I intend striking out da solo for Suicide Town. However, there is room for one more on my saddle if there really is someone who thinks they can take the arduous, discomforting ride. Understand, however, that you would join me not as a partner in the venture, at least not at first, but in a subordinate role. I will be Heritage Director of Suicide Town. I will be Suicide Director of Heritage Town. I will manage, recruit, inspire and above all organise the award-winning exhibitions and the expert, enthusiastic staff. I will programme summer concerts of suicide music. I want to be the one who explains the great phenomenon to visiting personages, and to the hordes, when large-scale international transport returns, as it must. The innovative conceptual expertise which I have amply demonstrated above, backed up by my total command of the empirical data, qualifies me above all others for the post. I foresee no serious challenges or challengers, as long as I can make it out of here and across to Suicide Town. I am entitled to this dream and to my attempt to realise it. I do not expect any of you to wish me success but I must entreat you at least to not, out of envy or spite, attempt to prevent me from leaving.Test Layout