He walks past Simon, stops, turns.
“You won’t be happy there, but then, I don’t think happiness is really your thing. So, let go of that. Let go of everything. Just—do what you’re told and try not to piss her off, your minder. That woman scares the shit out of me, if I’m being honest.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I had you committed this morning. Turns out you’re a danger to yourself and others. But don’t worry. It’s very discreet. Reeducation. Think of it like that—you’ve been brainwashed and we’re rescuing you. Reorienting your priorities. You’ll be out before you turn eighteen, straight to Harvard or Yale as long as you put your head down, focus on your studies.”
He steps through the hatch and starts down the steps to the Jetway.
“Your mother sends her love, by the way,” he says. “Maybe I should have led with that.”
Simon sits stunned. He watches his father cross the runway, slide into the backseat of the Porsche. Gabe Lin closes the door, and the car pulls away.
Cliffs
In the long view of history, mass suicide is not a new phenomena. More than nine hundred Jews are purported to have killed themselves to end the siege of Masada in the first Jewish-Roman War. The men inside knew that if they surrendered, the Romans would kill them and enslave their women and children. And so the men killed their families and then drew lots to see who would kill them in turn.
In 1802 Napoleon’s forces surrounded five hundred former slaves in the Battle of Matouba in Haiti. The Haitians chose to ignite their own gunpowder stores when the French troops charged, killing themselves and four hundred French soldiers in a last-ditch act of self-sacrifice. A year later, in Greece, sixty women trapped outside Epirus by Albanian troops chose to leap from the cliff’s edge, their children in their arms, rather than be captured and enslaved. They were reported to be dancing and singing when they jumped.
Stories like these can be found from the Punic Wars to the end of World War Two, when, in the face of advancing Russian forces, thousands of German civilians killed themselves rather than face the horrors they had been warned the Russians would force upon them. In the town of Demmin alone, one thousand people are reported to have committed suicide, most by drowning themselves in one of the three rivers that flowed through town. As in Masada, those with children made the grisly decision to kill their young first, weighing them down with stones and tossing them into the deep.
In 2003, in India, 1,707 committed suicide in the face of record crop failure. Three years later, in the province of Vidarbha, 767 farmers are reported to have killed themselves in all the ways that people do: by rope, by fire, by gun. During the same period in Japan, lonely citizens formed assisted-suicide groups online, using anonymous screen names. In sixty reported cases, more than 180 people took sleeping pills and then blocked the exhaust pipes of their cars, turning them into mobile gas chambers. The Japanese, of course, had a long and storied history when it came to organized suicide. At the end of WWII, in addition to the fabled kamikaze pilots, who would crash their fighter planes into enemy ships, the emperor ordered civilians to commit “sudan jiketsu.” When US troops took Saipan, hundreds of Japanese men, women, and children leaped off a cliff into the ocean. Hundreds more leaped to their death from two high cliffs at Marpi Point, later named Suicide Cliff and Banzai Cliff. Sometimes parents would slit their children’s throats before throwing them over the edge and following them.
Perhaps you’ve noticed a theme in these deaths—a sense of foreboding. The enemy approaches, circling like wolves. Death feels inevitable, but more concerning is the fear of what fresh horrors will come first. Rape and torture. Shame and humiliation.
Then there are the tales of religious leaders and their devoted followers. We know them well by now. Jim Jones and his Kool-Aid massacre, Heaven’s Gate’s thirty-nine acolytes found poisoned in their beds, wearing thirty-nine pairs of matching Nike sneakers, or perhaps you’re familiar with the story of fifty-three members of the Solar Temple blowing themselves to smithereens.
In 1682 Tsar Feodor ordered the leader of a Russian Christian sect known as the Old Believers to be put to death, burning him alive. In response, thousands of Old Believers locked themselves in churches around the country and set themselves on fire.
They too believed the end was near, and rather than wait for the inevitable, they vowed to take control, because dying by your own hand was a choice. A way to wrestle your mortality back from the gods of cruelty and chance.