“Did you see everybody standing?” she says.
“They had to stand, Mom,” says Story. “It’s the national anthem.”
Margot meets her husband’s eye and smiles. He smiles back, feeling both restless and content. Content because the idea of America when absorbed through imagery or idealistic song brings an almost overwhelming sense of identity, of belonging. A swell of national wonder. And restless because feelings are not facts, and the desire to belong, to be something, doesn’t make that dream come true.
Hope.
From the promenade they can see the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. They can see kids on scooters and kids on bikes. They can hear the happiness of boys on swings, vaulting up into the twilight, their feet kicking—higher, higher. It is the hour after dinner, when all the nannies have gone home for the night, when families cleave together with the illusion of permanence. A parent will always be a parent. A child will always be a child. Like a warm breeze that brings with it the feeling that happiness is a temperature.
Everything is all right. Mommy’s here.
You don’t have to worry. Daddy’s got you.
As if time itself wasn’t devouring every second, propelling the young toward old age and the elderly toward death. As if the parents themselves weren’t once children, clinging to their own parents’ legs. And their parents weren’t toddlers themselves a few decades before. As if any moment could last forever, caught in midair, like a single note trembling without beginning or end, like
the home of the—
brave.
Book 1
Slow Violence
Now
The summer our children began to kill themselves was the hottest in history. Around the globe, the mercury soared. We argued about this, of course, on news networks and in op-eds, talking heads from both sides—their likenesses beamed to gas station flat-screens and airplane seatbacks—debating the definition of heat, of history, some arguing that the very idea of measuring temperature itself was a liberal ploy. Meanwhile, tornadoes plowed furrows through Midwestern cities, and sales of mobile air conditioners sparked riots in cities like Oslo and Reykjavík. This is who we had become by then, people who gathered in the rain, arguing over whether or not they were getting wet.
No one can say with certainty whose child was the first to go. Suicide, while tragic, has never been exactly rare among teenagers and young adults. We tend to think of it as a local phenomenon—house by house, community by community. A playground peppered with stunned faces, school flags lowered to half-mast. Like any variation on death, we measure it in tears. Mothers and fathers hollowed out by grief, oblivious to the horns of other motorists as they idle at crosswalks long past green. Counselors brought in to minister to the existential heartbreak of friends and loved ones. Why would they do that? Why couldn’t I stop them? What else could we have done? All the fundamental questions of human existence born from a solitary, self-annihilating act.
And something else. Fear.
Suicide, you see, is an idea. And like any idea, it can spread from person to person to person. Anyone who has ever stood at a great height and felt the impulse to jump recognizes the draw. And what is adolescence if not a great height from which we are all expected to jump? A precipice of hormones and doubt, of alienation and longing. No longer a child. Not yet grown. Trapped in the pain of becoming.
But what if you could make the pain stop?
What if the answer was not to endure the transition and all its adjacent misery but to end it?
After all, what lies at the end of adolescence if not the future? And as one pundit said on CNN recently, The future isn’t what it used to be. We had surrounded ourselves with technological miracles, but all they did was show us how primitive the human meat between our ears still was. Our problems had become Stone Age once more. Superstition, tribalism, et cetera.
A11.
A single spark can start an inferno. Or it can flare harmlessly, like a firefly.
The difference is oxygen, kindling, and luck.
And the oxygen in this case was the contagiousness of ideas, the awful stickiness of self-murder that most of us failed to understand in that critical first wave. We were living in the age of the meme, after all. Children pledging themselves to Slender Man, leading their classmates into the mossy woods, kitchen knives in hand.
*
The Carpenters of Madison, Wisconsin, were the ones that people noticed first. On May 15, young Brad Carpenter, sixteen, fashioned a noose from an extension cord and hanged himself in the attic of the three-story Edwardian his parents had renovated six years earlier. His mother found him dangling, a stack of his underwear, laundered and folded, in her hands. Two days later, Todd Billings, seventeen, captain of the ski team, put a plastic bag over his head at the exact moment that Tim O’Malley, fifteen, mathlete, sliced a vein, then another, bleeding out into the bathroom sink. All were firstborn sons. Each drove a hand-me-down car. Todd died with his braces on. Brad’s last regret was that he wouldn’t live to see his acne clear up.