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TRIGGER WARNING for character suicide

Elizabeth had envied Mano her capacity to feel at home anywhere but hadn't regretted it when it'd meant she could get out of where she'd badly needed to get out of. It was in Brazil that Mano had first met Klein. Their initial casual greetings at a peace march had somehow morphed into a much more involved conversation without either of them having really seen it coming.

• You know, I don't think I've ever met any other skunks before. Are they all as hyper, arrogant and fast-talking as you?
• Most of us only wish we were.
• So, where are you from?
• Just some terribly chilly socialist English colony up north which there isn't that much of interest to say about, honestly.
• You came all the way down here for this? Man, you are one motivated mammal.
• Actually, I came down here for a capoeira seminar. I only heard about this march yesterday soon after getting here then I decided I didn't want to miss it.
• What's capoeira?
• Oh, you poor deprived soul!
• I'm sure there are plenty of reasons for which I could say the same about you.
• All of which I'd be grateful to you for pointing out.
• I'd be grateful to you for not letting me remain deprived for longer than I need to be.
• But of course. Capoeira is the most amazing martial art in the world.
• You're entitled to your own wrong opinion.
• What makes you say that?
• I don't doubt that it's amazing, but kalaripayattu could probably do better hands down.
• I think that might depend on just how many of those hands there'd be.
• Care to make it interesting?
• Maybe later. Right now I'm afraid that being at a peace march trying to beat each other up could send the wrong message.
• What brought a proud ass-kicker like yourself to a peace march in the first place, I wonder?
• No matter how good capoeira is at kicking ass, there's a lot more to it than that, if you can believe that.
• Actually, I can. Kalaripayattu's connected to so many other things that it's not even funny.
• Like what?
• Religion, for one thing.
• Hinduism?
• Got it in one.
• Capoeira's not that different as far as that goes, except that instead of taking an existing religion to follow, those who came up with it came up with a religion of their own by mixing three existing ones together.
• That does sound kind of interesting, I have to admit. So what's someone as religious as you doing at a peace march?
• Oh, I'm not religious. I just think religion's too socially relevant not to at least take a look at. I'm assuming you're not either.
• That's the second incorrect assumption I've heard from you today. Do you get tired of being wrong?
• No, there's too much to learn from it.
• Snappy comeback.
• Thank you.
• Why would you assume that about me?
• Right now I'm seeing you take part in an action, walking for peace, and speaking words, namely, that someone religious would be unlikely to do what you're doing. Surely you can see how even someone less confused than I am could have been misled.
• Then you can probably see how I could have been misled as to your own beliefs since you'd seemed to have been so interested by it.
• I think it's healthy to be interested in a lot of things.
• I'd be in a bad position to argue with that.
• To your credit.
• Thank you.
• What brought you here?
• Elizabeth told me about it.
• Who's she?
• My girlfriend. I'm going with the assumption that you don't have a problem with that.
• I've had lots of issues with my exes, but gender's only ever been one when who I was with made it into one.
• Glad to hear it.
• So, she's an activist, she keeps up with things?
• More than anyone I've ever met in my life, yeah.
• Impressive.
• Undeniably. She is kind of who I learned that most religious people weren't that progressive from.
• Well, quality over quantity, I always say.
• You're too kind.
• What made you think I meant you?

At this point he'd flashed her a toothy grin and this had been the second time on that day she'd successfully held herself back from punching him in the face, which she'd duly congratulated herself for. They'd ended up leaving together to finish talking over two steaming mugs of strong Brazilian coffee at a cheap café somewhere, and by the end of the day she'd understood why it'd made sense for a capoeirista to be at a peace march.

You never know where they're gonna come from, dammit.

Elizabeth had always said that the less people read scripture, the better, and Mano's faith had lost enough ground by then that she'd been no longer sure she'd entirely disagreed with that. Mano had had to go through many conversations about spirituality with Elizabeth before getting to that point.

• Most religions teach forgiveness and if more people forgave each other, the cycle of revenge we came here to escape from would be closer to its end.
• I'll tell you what forgiveness is, Mano. Forgiveness is a slave owner beating his slaves in the morning, raping them in the afternoon and going to confession in the evening.
• What about me, though? You know my religious upbringing didn't prevent me from growing up to have an open mind.
• You know not having been religious never prevented me from valuing morality.
• Isn't having faith in each other as people important, though? Isn't that what personal trust, social cohesion and even love depend on?
• I disagree. People have to earn your faith by showing you they're worthy of it. Believing without seeing is exactly what makes soldiers follow orders unquestioningly.
• Well, I think religion was initially good before hypocrites took it for themselves to corrupt and I think if enough people like me tried to take it back from them, it could become good again.
• Good intentions pave the way to hell, Mano. If you say you belong to a group, people are going to assume that you agree with it on everything and by adding to their number, you'll be adding to their credibility.
• Isn't reincarnation a good concept, though? Don't you think people should be making more of an effort to ask themselves what it's like to be in something else's shoes?
• If you look at it closely enough, the concept that you have to advance from one life to the next would have to mean that some lives are superior to other lives, wouldn't it?
• Maybe technically, I guess. I think the point of karma is supposed to be that even if you're rich, you still have to treat the poor well because what if in your next life you end up being poor yourself? Also if you choose not help them even though you easily could, that's bad karma, isn't it?
• But if you're poor in the first place, doesn't that have to mean that you must have done something wrong to deserve it? Whatever happened to bad things happening to good people, as they're wont to?
• What if there was a religion which took the basic injustice of existence into account?
• The only one I can think of which even remotely fits that description would have to be Gnosticism, but having an almighty evil god to blame seems too convenient to me, and too hopeless to include the possibility of change. Being given the right to give up by default is as much of a crutch as being assured of victory without effort.
• Okay, so maybe religion is a crutch, but aren't people's emotional deficiencies just as real as their physical ones?
• Yes, but most people with real crutches don't go around beating people on the head with them.
• Doesn't Hinduism teach people to do no harm above all else?
• Sometimes when oppression can be enforced without violence, violence becomes the only thing which can break oppression, and I'd be interested to know how burning a widow after her husband's death isn't doing harm to her.
• I see what you mean about how violence can be necessary sometimes, but don't Sikhs teach women and lower castes to fight back?
• In theory, yes, but you can have too much of a good thing, I think carrying a knife everywhere is overdoing it and let's not even go into where they stand on marriage equality.
• Okay, even assuming that it doesn't have any other value than that, my religion taught me a lot of ways to heal myself I use on a daily basis and I don't see any harm in that.
• Most of those have scientific explanations which would be described just as well with scientific terms.
• Isn't spiritual language more poetic, though?
• Poetry is poetic, Mano, and does a much better job of it without pretending to be anything it's not, at that.

Elizabeth had always found it ironic that she'd have been named after a Bishop, given that she'd always valued accuracy over Truth and that deep down, she just couldn't trust the word of a fisherman, since they were so well-known for having such a tendency to exaggerate for effect.

In the end, Mano had relented. She hadn't been able to justify some of the things which what she'd needed to believe in had been associated with, to sever that association as much as she'd wanted to or to prove the existence of anything beyond the scope of historical materialism, but the thought of letting go of her faith had still bothered her somehow. It'd felt so much like letting go of such a deeply integrated part of her identity, of her character, of her personality, that she'd been afraid she'd no longer recognize herself without it. She'd been afraid to have to live without something to hang on to, something to give purpose and meaning to her life, something to make her feel like she could really be worth something on some kind of grand, objective scale. She'd been afraid to miss having a familiar set of symbols she could manipulate at her leisure in the back of her mind. Refusing easy answers was going to mean asking herself some really difficult questions.

"Nobody even cares where they're going, as long as they get somewhere."

• So if you had to pick between her and me, which one of us do you think is closer to the truth?
• I'd rather not have to, if I could avoid it.
• Really? Why?
• People's beliefs are shaped by ten thousand things, their lives, their experiences, their aesthetics, their dreams... To me, issues in which who you are means as much to what your opinion is as what your opinion is means to who you are can't be approached without bias by anyone, so there's no such thing as an objective observer. Maybe if two people agree on everything one of them isn't thinking. Maybe an ideal world isn't one in which everyone agrees but one in which people who disagree can get along. Maybe the opposite of a great truth doesn't have to be a great falsehood but another great truth, you know?
• That's a lot of maybes.
• That's absolutely true.
• Elizabeth would probably call that cheap new age hand-wringing.
• From a certain perspective, she'd be right, but not caring what people believe doesn't prevent me from caring about why and about what they do about it and that's gotta be worth something, right?
• Heh. Maybe. I still think it'd be a bad idea to introduce you two.
• Well, if you ever change your mind, here's my contact info if you want it.
• Sure.
• You're a journalist, aren't you?
• Yes, why do you ask?
• What would you say if I told you I know the locations of factories in this country whose supervisors definitely don't expect the arrival of a journalist at?
• I'd say they're probably just about due for one, and it's a dirty job but someone has to do it. How'd you get ahold of those?
• Long story. Sins to atone for and whatnot.
• Hey, it's help, I need as much of it as I can get, and that's good enough for me.

Elizabeth had taken as much as she'd been able to carry with her when they'd left India together, but after a few years abroad on unremarkable salaries, their resources had dwindled, and the animal struggle to survive and break free from constraints had begun to take its toll on her mood. The resignation she'd see on some faces out there wanted her more than anything to get across to people that they really did deserve better than what they had, and that was something she'd needed to convince herself of also. She'd still carried many old grudges she could never completely make herself forget about, and the ever-growing disparity between her ideals and reality had made her vision of the future become more dystopian with every passing day. It had seemed to her as if no matter how many times she'd started her life over, it still hadn't gotten that much better, and she'd begun to wonder whether the problem had really been with the world or if it had been with herself.

"This is getting to be too much for me."

She'd been raised to be a self-denying over-achiever, to see pleasure as sin, mistakes as moral failings, judgement as well-deserved and suffering as redeeming, and as much as she'd tried to fight those tendencies within her, she'd never managed to get herself rid of most of the perfectionism, irritability and impatience which had been drilled into her. Mano had grown up learning that even minuscule things can grow to great sizes if you were willing to get your hands dirty and if you just gave them enough care and time, that the longer you could hold the same position, the better, and that every broken thing could be fixed with the right tools and method. Elizabeth had grown up being forced to skip dinner to lose enough weight to be fast enough to keep up with her fencing instructor at 5 moves a second if she'd lost to him, had been sent to her room if she hadn't washed her hands well enough and had been grounded if she'd gotten any answer of the pop literature quizzes she'd been regularly put through wrong because what would have been the point of going out if she wouldn't have been able to remember what she'd have been going to see anyway? To her, change in the world or in her life could have never gone far enough fast enough, failure had been a disgrace, curing the symptoms was worthless if their root causes remained unaddressed, and how interconnected they all were made them feel like an inextricable net keeping them and others like them trapped underneath it. Despite how much she'd hated the people she'd run away from, she couldn't help having become used to a certain standard of living while she'd been growing up, and while she'd never missed anyone from her previous life, there'd been things which she had.

• You know, Mano, as much as you're better company than I've ever been fortunate enough to live with, I really wish we could afford a glass of wine or an art film every now and then. Beer just tastes like piss to me and the sitcoms on TV don't exactly fill me with much of a sense of purpose. It's not that I hate the music they play here, but would it kill them to play some good old Tchaikovsky or Ludwig Van once in a while? I don't care how famous Brazilian coffee is worldwide, it's still not worth a damn cup of Earl Grey. I'd be lying if I said that the kind of money you need to have to be able to afford anything culturally enriching hadn't contributed to making poverty my white whale, you know?
  • I don't mean to sound rude, but you know I'm of lower extraction than you, right?
  • Yeah.
  • Do I strike you as someone who's culturally impoverished?
  • That's not what I meant at all. I just think that when people are exposed to artistic beauty, that makes them more sensitive to moral beauty by extension.
  • There's another side to that coin, you know. For a long time people believed that everyone who was deformed was punished by God.
  • Plants need to be in the right kind of soil, to be trimmed right, to be given the right kind of fertilizer and to hear the right kind of music to grow well, Mano, you as a gardener should know that.
  • Plants may look all nice and friendly, but they're merciless little creatures when you really stop to examine how they interact with each other, and basing our society on theirs would turn modern capitalism into a regretted utopian past.
  • Women like me need money to be able to write as well as they can, haven't you ever read A Room of One's Own?
  • No, but I've read lots of books by famous authors and seen lots of art by famous painters who died without a penny to their names and who were only discovered after their deaths.
  • And did you ever stop to think about what they could have accomplished if they hadn't had to struggle with poverty on top of trying to come up with art to make...?

Mano had begun to understand just how important it had been to Elizabeth to win this one because of what it'd meant to her well enough to have acknowledged that she couldn't argue with that. Honestly, sometimes she'd felt like they'd argued out of restlessness more than anything else. The constant nerve-wracking confrontations with conservative adversaries and poetry critics had been beginning to get to Elizabeth, and as much as she'd have appreciated making more, she'd begun to suspect that barring very few exceptions, there just wasn't any really well-paying work out there for anyone who didn't have the kind of Cartesian mindset to break down their every single mental barrier, who didn't have connections, who didn't have the obsequiousness to jump through just about any kind of hoop and who didn't have the capacity to put their conscience aside at will. Her thoughts of a day on which she'd finally have been able to transition had begun to lose some of their tangibility.

• Would it help if I stopped referring to you by your birth gender?
• Thanks, but no. I've been saving that for after my metamorphosis, and to me, having that start happening right now would imply I'm accepting it'll never happen. I'm not ready for that quite yet.

"Is this ever going to end?"

Mano had never completely lost the habit of doing the kind of work around the house she'd been doing when they'd first met, since that had been when their 'roles' had been defined to them and besides, she'd simply been more efficient and had minded less given the better shape she'd been in and the number of hands she'd had. By comparison, Elizabeth had been feeling conflicted between wanting to be the helpful knight in shining shell-plate rather than the princess needing to be rescued on one hand, and not having wanted to be the angel in the kitchen, the traditional housewife she'd been brought up to be, on the other. It'd been difficult for her to motivate herself to really get in shape because she'd known that the invulnerable, immovable shell around her at all times would never show any difference afterwards and would always make her look overweight no matter how much effort she'd have made, plus she'd thought sweat stank to high heaven, had a limited range of motion and the heat would get trapped in her shell when she'd work out. She'd appreciated how practical to cleaning Mano's ability to squeeze through just about any space had been, but it'd been difficult for her not to privately resent her for it. Mano had regretted not being able to give Elizabeth massages to help her relax, but her back muscles had been almost impossible to reach, and this'd kept the fun kind of pain she'd have otherwise considered asking for as a distraction from emotional pain away from her also. Her shell had seemed to her like an ironically appropriate manifestation of the metaphorical barrier between herself and a world she'd desperately wanted to feel closer to.

The imagination she'd relied on to write had also worked against her. She'd developed a haunting fear that as long as she'd remain alive, there'd remain a possibility that some day her parents would finally track her down and drag her away to stuff her in their mold again. She hadn't wanted people to interpret her recovery from some of what she'd been through as license to put others through the same because since she'd have gotten over it, it couldn't have really been that bad, but even having had Mano tell her that as far as she'd been concerned re-gaining the permission to allow themselves to be happy again had been something a lot of survivors had needed to get from others just as much as acknowledgment of what they'd been through still hadn't made the task itself any easier for her. She'd wanted to feel better for Mano's sake, had realized that wanting to do too much for others had been what had gotten into the condition she'd been in in the first place, then that she couldn't feel better for her own sake either because deep down she'd been convinced that she hadn't really deserved it all that much.

Talking mostly to people who'd violently disagreed with her and hadn't shied away from ad hominem attacks all day hadn't been a good way to build up her self-esteem, she'd been aware of that, but she still wouldn't have been able to forgive herself for letting them get away with the kind of crap they'd been spouting, not for her sake. She'd felt guilty about the stress she'd been under having been making her snap at Mano over nothing all the time, she'd hated her own temper for turning her into someone she hadn't wanted to be, and she'd felt as if she'd been losing control of herself like Dr. Jekyll, werewolves or the demonically possessed. She'd felt like an emotional vampire for having gotten moral support from Mano and having had only more hopelessness to give her in return for it. She'd begun to feel that her best work had been behind her, and didn't want to end up being remembered for having been the kind of person who she'd been afraid to have been going to turn into, recanting on her deathbed for having spent her life fighting windmills. She'd wanted to help others but couldn't help herself. If all the world was a stage, she hadn't liked the play she'd been watching at all, and she'd figured that the sincerest form of criticism on it she could have made would have been to walk out on it way before the curtain call.

"This place is driving me crazy."

Mano hadn't been blind enough to miss what Elizabeth had been going through.

• There's something I've been meaning to ask you for a while now but I'm not really sure how to go about it.
• Short and direct usually works well enough.
• Have you ever given any thought to giving a shot to psychiatric treatment?
• Why, do you think I'm crazy?
• That's what I was afraid to sound like.
• Well, of course. Who wants to sound crazy?
• I meant that I hadn't wanted you to think I thought you were.
• Because you know I don't want to sound crazy either, and you thought the best way of accomplishing that was by saying I should go see a psychiatrist, is there any part of this I'm getting wrong?
• I... I shouldn't have said that, you're right. I understand why that would have offended you.
• Then why'd you ask?
• I'm concerned about you, Eli.
• That's sweet.
• Come on, I'm... It's not that I think that you're crazy but it's been seeming like the world's really been getting to you a lot lately, and I'm concerned about that.
• Me too. That's why I'm working so hard on getting back at it. Have you seen what the world is like? You'd have to be crazy for it not to get to you.
• I know. I just don't want it to end up getting to you so much that the good guys would... lose a really precious ally over it.
• Look, I appreciate what you're trying to do, but it's not going to work. I've been put on meds before, Mano, and nobody'd granted me the courtesy of asking me whether I wanted to or not. They'd made me so dissociated from reality that someone could have died right in front of me and I wouldn't have given a damn, and they'd made all the garbage I'd written while under them even worse than usual. I'd rather have a native American smother me with a pillow than go through that again.
• What about therapy without any chemicals, then?
• How about I just repress my anger no matter how justified, convince myself that my mind works the same as everyone else's and stick people in boxes with labels redefining their personalities as disorders and save us both a lot of time and money?
• I won't mention it again.
• I wish you'd never mentioned it at all.
• How would you feel about trying a few possible mental healing tools you know the powers that be don't want you to use?
• Now, you know I think people should be able to do any damn thing with their own bodies they want to do, but as far as I'm concerned, my mind's the only weapon I have against my enemies and it's already been messed with enough as it is. Besides, I wouldn't even know which kind to get.
• Pot?
• Ancient Hindu meditation tool. I'll pass.
• Hash?
• A caliph used it to fool religious fanatics into sacrificing themselves over artificial paradises. Not a compelling legacy.
• Shrooms?
• I've made it my goal in life to get as close to the truth as possible, not to escape reality.
• Ecstasy?
• Unhappiness serves the same function as pain, Mano. If you make yourself always happy by default, you lose your ability to know when something's wrong.
• ... Opium?
• Of the masses. Guess how my country got an economic foothold in China. Go on, guess.

"I can't stand this and I know I can't do anything about it, what am I gonna do?"

• Listen, I know you're not going to like what I have in mind, but I still think I should be up front with you. I owe you as much.
• I really hope this isn't going where it sounds like it's going.
• Do you trust me to make my own decisions about my own life or not?
• It's not that I don't.
• Then what do you call it?
• It's not because it's you. I just think that anyone's sense of judgement gets impaired when their life really isn't going the way they want at all.
• Last time I heard that, some asshole conservative was using it as a reason for which no one should take anything I say seriously.
• You know I don't feel that way about you.
• I thought I did, yeah.
• Eli, I... I...
• What? Speak!
• I don't know what to say! I don't want to say anything to hurt you, I just don't want you to have to be in so much pain.
• Me either. That's my point.
• Please, don't take my reason to live away from me! Not after everything we've been through.
• But that's just it. We've been through so much, Mano. I don't know how much more I can stand having to go through.
• I'd be willing to stand by you through literally anything.
• I don't want to have to be a burden to you.
• You mean everything to me!
• You're saying that to be nice to me.
• I'm being honest!
• You're doing the right thing because that's just what you do. Don't worry, I understand.
• You... I...
• Look, I'll try, okay? Just a little more to see how it goes. I know I might not sound like it but I really do know how much this means to you. I'll do my best, just don't expect too much from me, okay...?

Privately she'd already begun to think about which method she could have been going to use.

"I need a miracle."

Her head had been covered with plates which despite how intricate, ornate and delicate they may have seemed, still protected her head like a hard hat so she couldn't have shot herself in the head, she hadn't been comfortable with the Freudian connotations of a gun barrel in her mouth and wouldn't have wanted to do herself in the same way Hemingway had anyway. She'd have committed hara-kiri like a samurai if her chest-plate hadn't been able to turn any katana's blade, she'd have used explosives if she hadn't been afraid to accidentally damage her surroundings enough to be remembered like a suicide bomber, she'd have drank hemlock like Socrates if she hadn't had immunity to virtually every poison genetically engineered into her, she'd have hung herself but she'd been no repentant Judas, she'd have slit her wrists if it hadn't developed such tacky associations from typical teenager overuse, she'd have starved herself if she hadn't had more reserves to wait through than she'd had the patience of waiting for the loss of, and she'd have drowned herself like Woolf if she couldn't have breathed underwater.

The more she'd seen just how many barriers her parents had built into her to prevent her from dying, the more she'd felt like she'd almost been challenged to do so. She'd thought of setting herself on fire, but not only did she not want to pass for a Buddhist protester, she hadn't wanted the last thing she'd smell to be burning turtle flesh because she hadn't wanted her body to be found lying in her own vomit. She'd heard of birds dropping crustaceans from high up enough to crack them open and had thought of having a great enough fall that no one could put her back together again, but her fear of heights and the thought of which kind of pathetic condition she'd have been left in if she'd accidentally survived had nipped those thoughts in the bud before they could materialize. Finally while idly flipping through Mano's auto-suggestion guidebooks, she'd unexpectedly found something which had caught her attention.

She'd learned that there'd been yogis who'd mastered a mental body-affecting technique through which they could slow their own heartbeats all the way down to 40 or even 38 beats per minute, and that some of them had been claiming that this could have been like having a cyanide pill in their mouths to swallow if they'd been captured by the enemy at all times. Elizabeth had researched those techniques in depth, she'd studied them, memorized them, practiced them and had mastered them. For a moment, Mano had thought that she'd actually been feeling better simply because the mere thought that she finally did have a way to take herself out at any time which she may have wanted to had been that liberating to her. Before long, though, she'd scolded herself for having delayed the inevitable for so long because she'd become afraid that the longer she'd have waited, the likelier she'd have been to eventually chicken out.

"I will face my fear."

It hadn't been that she hadn't had any willpower, far from it, it's just that her will to die had been even stronger than her will to live.

Mano had found a note one morning tasting oceans in her eyes.

'Don't ever blame yourself, Mano, you did everything you could and I really do mean that.

I don't think I've ever told you this, but atheism's never been associated with hopelessness for me. You see, it's not that I wish there were an afterlife but can't convince myself that it's possible for there to be one, it's not even that I'm that afraid of hell anymore, it's just that my version of an ideal afterlife is one in which I finally get to stop having to exist.

I remember reading an interesting theory about the afterlife one day. It was that after we die, we all go to whatever our own personal idea of what the afterlife should be is. It's a lot more non-confrontational that I usually care for, but right now, for some reason, it doesn't really seem all that bad to me. If that was true, it'd mean you could still go through however many incarnations you're still supposed to have left after your current one and I, on the other hand, could achieve dissolution right now.

I'm going to go find out the truth of the matter for myself now. If you're right, I'll have to agree and if I'm right, I'll no longer be around to argue, so either way, the debate ends here. I'm going to go with heart failure, like Neruda. If I do have to get reincarnated, I hope I come back as something soft, squishy, easygoing, gentle and male.

You're strong, Mano. I know you can get over me. I've never seen anything you couldn't get over. I want to have been a stepping stone for you, not a roadblock. We're only steps in evolution, you and I, nowhere near its pinnacle, and I may not have told you this enough, but you never had to be just the way I was, you know. Evolution will still keep going even after I'll be gone, and I'm reconciled with that. Scatter my ashes at the Galapagos.

I may have never believed in your gods, but I've always believed in you.

Ever your mock turtle,

Elizabeth.'