Читать книгу An Unexplained Death - Mikita Brottman - Страница 12

IV

AT FIRST, LIKE everyone else, I assume Rey Rivera has taken his own life. When you learn that a man has plunged to his death from the top of a high building, you generally assume he has jumped, not that he has been pushed.

But those who knew Rivera say the idea of suicide makes no sense at all. They say he never showed the least sign of depression, and is the very last person they can imagine wanting to die. He was young, good-looking, newlywed, and excited about the future. He and Allison had put their house on the market, and were making plans to move back to Los Angeles to start a family. After her husband’s death, Allison looked through all Rey’s private journals, notebooks, computer files and caches, but she found nothing conspicuous or unusual, certainly nothing to suggest he was unhappy in secret.

What’s more, Rey had been particularly busy the week he died. Earlier on the day he went missing, he made a call to a company that rented out video editing equipment, and he booked an editing suite for the coming weekend to finish a project. He spoke to a man named Mark Gold, who’d rented equipment to him before. Gold said Rey sounded under a lot of pressure to get the project finished on time, but that “it sounded like a fairly average editing task.” Other than that, said Gold, it was an ordinary, everyday conversation.

Rey’s colleague, Steven King, confirmed that Rey’s editing project was due the following week. In March 2006, Rey had filmed the Oxford Club’s annual conference in Delray Beach, Florida. “We needed the video to send out to those subscribers who hadn’t been able to make it to the conference,” King told me. “Rey had been working on the video along with our advertising team. Our advertising manager spoke to him about it the day he went missing. She asked him if he had any idea when the video would be ready, and he’d said he’d have it to her by Monday.”

Rey booked the edit suite for Saturday, May 20, but he never showed up. After learning about his death, Mark Gold said that, in conversation, Rivera sounded “totally not like someone who would throw himself off a building. It was too banal. He sounded like he was under a crunch for work.” Steven King said he never got hold of the videotape Rey had been working on. All Rey’s computers and video equipment were confiscated by the police, and the company had to reimburse the subscribers who had already paid for the video.

The phone call on Tuesday, May 16, that caused Rivera to leave home in a hurry was from somebody at Agora, the umbrella organization of which the Oxford Club was a subsidiary. At the time, Agora used a business line that diverted all its connections to a single number, so it is impossible to know who placed the call. No one at Agora admits to calling or meeting with Rivera that day, although the company’s phone records for that day show five calls to Rivera’s number. To all appearances, Rey rushed off because he was late to a meeting. If so, it must have been pretty informal, or a meeting with someone he knew well, since he was wearing a T-shirt and flip-flops.

After Rey’s death, employees at Agora were instructed not to speak about the matter to the police. They were protected by the company’s lawyers. Allison never learned who placed that final call.

According to NAMI (the National Alliance on Mental Illness), 90 percent of suicide “completers” display evidence of a diagnosable mental disorder. I am constitutionally skeptical of statistics, and I would certainly not trust any claims made on behalf of suicide “completers.” Since the questions must have been asked after the suicides were “completed,” who is being consulted about “displays of evidence”—the suicide’s family and friends? To me, the conclusions drawn from this “data” are indicative of the paradox at the heart of the issue: the fact that a person commits suicide has come to be regarded, retroactively, as a symptom of mental illness—rather than, for example, an expression of personal will.

In contrast, people in some cultures consider suicide to be a morally responsible act when the alternative will bring shame or suffering to others. Such cultures do not consider individuals as beings with an existence separate from those of their families, as we do in the West. Japan is perhaps the best-known example of a culture in which even today, people are, for the most part, deeply tied to either their family or their business—and men, Japan’s most common suicide victims, are often joined tightly to both. In Japan, what happens to you happens to your family and the organization you work for, and so if you have done something that causes public shame—if you have stolen company money to cover gambling debts, for example, or paid money to prostitutes— suicide may be considered preferable to inflicting your shame on your family and your business. In such situations, suicide would not be regarded as a sin; on the contrary, it is often seen as a way to restore and make restitution to the family and the company. In some cases, it may even be considered the natural and morally responsible action, just as we in the West expect that someone who has experienced the death of a close relative will want to take time off from work to grieve their loss.

Although things are slowly changing, large Japanese cities still have problems with public suicides, especially on the subway. In Tokyo, at least one person every day throws himself on the tracks. When this happens, the words that appear on the screen on the platform announcing the reason for the delay are jinshin jiko, which translates as “human accident.” Such suicides are so common that they have become an inevitable part of the daily commute, hardly worth grumbling about.

Japan Rail has tried to discourage jinshin jiko in various ways, such as undermining the family honor rationale by introducing a rule that the suicide’s family is charged an enormous fine to compensate for commuter delays—a sum that would be financially devastating if it had to be paid all at once (fortunately, it can be paid in installments). Other disincentives include platform barriers, telephone hotlines, emergency buttons by the tracks, soothing blue lights, even softly lit photographs of kittens; yet jinshin jiko goes on as before. People with a profound and constant desire to end their lives will manage to find a way, even in a closely guarded prison cell. Surely this shows us that suicide is not always an irrational act.

Even here in the United States, at least six states have now legalized physician-assisted suicide, confirming that death is an acceptable choice for anyone with a degenerative illness, in chronic pain, or otherwise unable to enjoy a decent quality of life—which cannot be measured only in terms of physical health. Those whose bodies are still robust and who seem fully engaged in the world may nevertheless be experiencing great psychological pain. Medication and therapy can go only so far.

Interestingly, when it comes to suicide, all the medical examiner needs to prove is that the person caused their own death; no motive need be established. The same is true in legal terms. A motive for suicide, while useful, is not necessary. It is not the job of medical examiners or attorneys to concern themselves with the psychological disposition of the decedent. If a motive is not obvious, they do not need to find one. It is, to put it crassly, none of their business. A 1947 article in the Yale Law Journal by Orville Richardson and Herbert S. Breyfogle reminds us that in distinguishing suicide from accident, motive is irrelevant. “The springs of human action are often hidden,” conclude the authors, “and are of such obscure origin that not even a psychiatrist with the full and voluntary cooperation of his patient can find them.”

Rey Rivera died in the middle of May. Most people assume the absence of sunshine triggers suicide risk. Winter can certainly be depressing, but it is indisputable that suicide rates worldwide increase significantly as soon as winter is over. From the cold depths of hibernation, it is common for the depressed to become so numb they cannot feel what Freud calls the “ordinary unhappiness” of daily life—they cannot mourn, grieve, or cry. They are on ice. When the winter comes to an end, however, the frozen depths begin, very slowly, to melt. Forgotten memories emerge. Old desires resurface. Movement and action are possible. “The bright day brings forth the adder.”

Spring is the real suicide season.

If Rey Rivera killed himself, it means he went from rushing to finish editing a video and making plans for the weekend, to suddenly deciding to jump off a very high building.

Is there such a thing as impulsive suicide? Do people really kill themselves suddenly and spontaneously, out of the blue? Those who study the subject believe so; they call this type of death the Richard Cory suicide, after Edwin Arlington Robinson’s famous poem. The Richard Cory suicide is considered to be the act of a supreme narcissist, a person who cannot admit, even to himself, that everything in his life has gone awry. The grandiose and mysterious final gesture thereby performs a kind of alchemy, transforming passive humiliation into an active mastery of the situation.

On an Internet suicide grief support forum, I found accounts of some of these Richard Cory suicides. At least, they were reports of people who apparently committed suicide abruptly and unexpectedly, in the middle of what appeared to be an otherwise ordinary day. One man wrote that his partner woke up late, realized she’d missed an important meeting, called in sick to work, showered, had lunch, and then hanged herself. A woman described how her father put laundry in the dryer then lined the stairs with masking tape, as if making ready to paint them, then changed his mind and hanged himself instead. Some accounts, more specific, led me to newspaper articles, Facebook pages, and memorial websites, where I learned about these perplexing deaths in more detail.

On December 18, 2010, Miss P., a popular and successful twenty-seven-year-old investment banker and charity worker, left her apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan early in the morning and walked sixteen blocks north to 180 Riverside. Surveillance video showed her entering the building dressed in Ugg boots and a winter jacket. She got into the elevator along with a woman who’d just returned from walking her dog. Miss P., who seemed alert and aware, asked the woman how to get to the roof of the building. The woman told her. At 8:13 a.m., Miss P.’s body was found in an interior courtyard; she was pronounced dead at the scene. She left no note. Friends and family say Miss P. was bright, attractive, ambitious, and well loved, and that she always appeared to be in high spirits. The day of her suicide, she’d planned to meet a close friend for brunch. “It’s like something just changed overnight,” said the friend.

On Tuesday, July 1, 2014, around nine in the morning, a number of people saw a man jumping from the Tobin Bridge in Boston. The jumper was reported on various Twitter accounts, including that of the Boston EMS, where he was described as “non-viable.” The Tobin Bridge is a two-level cantilevered structure, and the man, who was killed on impact, landed not in the water, but on the lower, northbound level of the bridge, which is an extension of the Charlestown neighborhood’s Terminal Street. He was later identified as Dr. F., fifty, a brilliant, handsome, and talented MIT professor and scientist. Well loved as a teacher, mentor, and passionate community activist, he was described by friends, family, and colleagues as cheerful, extroverted, and successful. He was married with two young daughters, and according to reports, had never suffered from depression or any mental illness.

On October 19, 2014, a former BBC journalist, K., fifty, was found hanged by her own bootlaces in a toilet at Istanbul’s Atatürk Airport. K., who had been working in Iraq as the interim director for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, was also working on a Ph.D. at the University of Canberra, and had just submitted the first chapter of her thesis to her supervisor. CCTV footage shows her entering the women’s bathroom alone. There was no sign of a struggle. She had two credit cards in her wallet, along with a large amount of cash. When her death was ruled a suicide, there was an outcry of disbelief. Those who knew her found it impossible to believe that K. would simply abandon her friends, loved ones, colleagues, and pets, and her important humanitarian work in the field of conflict.

On February 8, 2016, fifty-four-year-old Mrs. H. of Mountlake Terrace in the state of Washington, a systems analyst who worked at a center for HIV/AIDS research and prevention, took a piece of meat out of her freezer for dinner, drove to the overflow lot at the nearby park-and-ride as she did every workday, then texted the driver of her car pool that she had forgotten her workplace identification key, was running late, and would meet her in ten minutes. Then she left her car in the lot, walked a mile and a half, disposed of her work ID and cell phone so well they were never found, crawled into a ditch, taped a plastic bag over her head, and suffocated.

Friends, family, and coworkers describe Mrs. H. as “full of life.” At least five hundred people attended her funeral. She had been married for over thirty years, had a grown son, enjoyed her job, was active in the community, and had recently adopted a cat. Her car was found locked and secured, and nothing had been taken from it. Her clothes were intact and not in disarray. According to the autopsy report, the cause of death was “asphyxiation and fresh water drowning.” There were no injuries or defensive wounds consistent with an assault, abduction, or struggle. Toxicology tests revealed no unusual substances in Mrs. H.’s system. There was nothing to suggest she had been robbed. All suspects, including her husband, were eliminated. Her death was ruled a suicide.

These apparently impulsive and spontaneous acts of self-destruction baffled the police and bewildered family and friends, many of whom, as in the cases of K. and Mrs. H., refused to accept the verdict of the medical examiner. And yet we do not know how long any of these people had been contemplating the act; neither, perhaps, did they.

Consider the case of K., for example: just prior to her death, she had fallen asleep at the airport in Istanbul and missed her flight by fifteen minutes. The next flight was not for another twelve hours. For a seasoned traveler used to working in war zones, this should have been a minor setback, but K.’s sister, who gave interviews with the British press, believes it was the breaking point. Friends and colleagues regarded K. as fearless and resilient, but her sister suspects this was a persona K. worked hard to project. In her sister’s opinion, K. was fragile, vulnerable, and plagued by a sense of incompetence; she took on the problems of other people as a way to escape from her own. We assume that years of living and working in war zones makes a person tough, but K.’s sister thinks it had weakened K. to the breaking point, and that the accumulated trauma may have been just too much for her to bear.

On this particular night, her sister speculates, K. may have been simply “exhausted” and “emotionally raw.” It was late, K. was tired, she’d missed her flight, and perhaps the person at the desk had been rude or short with her. When told by airline staff she had to buy a new ticket, K. apparently became “tearful.” Surrounded by unfriendly strangers, she may have been feeling unbearably desolate and sad, and the thought of spending another twelve hours at the airport may have simply pushed her over the edge, leaving her unable to think about anything except extinguishing her pain. “I think she just took a snap decision to check out,” said her sister.

In the case of Mrs. H., we have no idea what could have happened over the weekend that might have sent her into a state of despondency by Monday morning. Had she learned some bad news? Had she been diagnosed with an illness? Had her husband asked for a divorce? Had she discovered an act of betrayal? Had she somehow lost hold of the thread that drew together the fabric of her life? I picture her taking the meat out of the freezer in the morning to defrost for her husband’s dinner, getting ready to go to work as usual, then suddenly realizing: There’s no point.

In other words, the suicide that appears impulsive to outsiders is often the result of inner preparation that may have been going on for a long time—perhaps even, as Albert Camus suggests in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus, unconsciously: “An act like this is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art. The man himself is ignorant of it. One evening he pulls the trigger or jumps.” Survivors of suicide attempts that they themselves describe as “impulsive” may be unaware of how often and how deeply they may have been thinking about the act (which is not to say that such acts are necessarily preceded by any obvious warnings). We are generally unaware of our habitual ruminations, prior notions, and mental rehearsals, and the suicidal in particular often develop habits of secrecy and duplicity. If the survivor of a suicide attempt describes their unsuccessful effort as “impulsive,” this may simply mean that they were not conscious of their motive at the time, or that they are ashamed to tell the truth. As Douglas Kerr remarks in his book Forensic Medicine, “The most unlikely people sometimes take their own lives, and their behavior immediately before the act frequently gives no indication of their intentions.”

In short, no one can know exactly what goes through the mind of a person who takes his or her own life. They may have been struggling with suicidal feelings for many years for unknown reasons. They may have barely been managing to maintain balance for weeks, perhaps months, before something finally tips them over the edge. It could be anything or nothing: a look, a gesture, a toothache, a headache, an unpleasant word, a fleeting, transient thought.

After the suicide of Dr. F. from the Tobin Bridge, local residents suggested that antisuicide barriers should be installed, as they have been on other bridges and landmarks known to attract suicidal jumpers. Such arguments are usually overruled on the grounds of expense, the fact that such barriers spoil the “life-enhancing” view (and may themselves even inspire thoughts of suicide), and the “common knowledge” that anybody wanting to kill him or herself will do so in the end, one way or another.

But every human mind is different, and each case is unique. Some people have a constant and profound desire to die that only grows more intense over time. Others may be genuinely suicidal, but if they have no opportunity to act, their feelings may gradually change. The suicidal impulse may manifest itself again when the chance to act arises, but it may not. It may appear in another form, or it may fade away altogether.

The idea that “anybody wanting to kill himself will do so in the end” was disproved at least thirty years ago by the British “gas suicide study,” which found evidence that between 1963 and 1975, the annual number of suicides in England and Wales showed a sudden, unexpected drop at a time when suicide was on the rise in most other European countries. This abrupt decline in suicides, it turned out, correlated with the progressive removal of carbon monoxide from the domestic gas supply, as the government had discovered that natural gas was much cheaper to use. The reduced suicide rate was an unanticipated and accidental consequence of this conversion, proving that most of those unable to kill themselves in the kitchen did not, eventually, look for different keys to Death’s private door.

Rey Rivera may have had good reason to be in the neighborhood of the Belvedere when he went missing, since the offices of Agora are in Mount Vernon, the historic district north of downtown where the former hotel is situated. He may even have been meeting someone in the Belvedere’s Owl Bar, which is open to the public, although bar staff have no recollections of seeing the conspicuously tall, handsome man that day. Still, even if he went to the Owl Bar, there was no reason for him to be anywhere else in the building, especially not on the roof, which is out of bounds even to condominium owners, who are legally entitled to access all the residential floors. And those who knew Rivera describe him as reliable and responsible, not the kind of person who was prone to spontaneous acts, of which jumping off a fourteen-story building is perhaps the embodiment.

Among the ranks of suicides, those who leap to their deaths have a special place. They are widely agreed to be the most impulsive. All you need is somewhere high. There is no need for any preparation—the gun, the noose, the car in the garage, the plastic bag, the razor blades, the right amount of medication. Most suicide methods hold the promise of pain, but high places are dizzying, intoxicating; with the sight of sky comes the idea of flight and final deliverance. In this regard, gravity is your friend. “To the mouse and any smaller animal,” writes J.B.S. Haldane in his essay “On Being the Right Size,” “gravity presents practically no dangers. You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft.” But as the saying goes, the bigger they come, the harder they fall. “A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.” Those who leap from high buildings into public places are, even if they are not conscious of it, angry with somebody, or perhaps everybody. They want to make an impact. They want to ruin your day.

The Owl Bar, date unknown

In a 1914 article on the many causes of human fear, the psychologist G. Stanley Hall described those who are afraid they will suddenly jump from a high place with no reason:

Very common is the impulse, usually very sudden, to hurl oneself down from towers, windows, roofs, bridges, high galleries in church or theater, precipices, etc., and not a few grew rigid, livid, clenched their hands and teeth, clung almost convulsively to railings or bystanders, or had to be held by their friends from plunging off in order to escape the tension by “ending it all” or “to see how it would feel” to fall or get the “beautiful sensation” of it. . . . The pure suicide motive in these cases is often a sudden eruption, it is a good opportunity to die and have it all over in a moment. There is little doubt, however, that this jumping off instinct in the young and old may lead to death without any real plan of suicide.

For many years, the Belvedere was one of Baltimore’s tallest buildings, and accessible to anyone with enough money to book a room for the night. Unsurprisingly, it has had its fair share of jumpers. For example, on February 22, 1954, thirty-three-year-old Dr. Marvin Alpert registered at the hotel with his twenty-seven-year-old wife, Lorraine. The couple had been married for just over five years, and had a young daughter. Normally, they lived at the Park Drive Manor, a large apartment-hotel in Philadelphia, but the previous October, Lorraine had been admitted to the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins, suffering from depression.

Dr. Alpert, a respected ophthalmologist at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, arrived in Baltimore that morning and went directly to the clinic to pick up his wife to spend the day with her. The weather was chilly, and Mrs. Alpert was in no mood for sightseeing, so it makes sense that the couple spent their conjugal visit at the Belvedere. Dr. Alpert was planning to stay overnight in Baltimore and to return to Philadelphia the following morning. Lorraine had to be back at the clinic by six p.m. About an hour before her curfew, Dr. Alpert left his wife in their fifth-floor room while he went to make a purchase at a nearby drugstore. When he returned, the room was cold, and his wife was nowhere in sight.

The window was standing open. Alpert ran to it, looked over the edge, and saw Lorraine lying unconscious on the roof of the hotel kitchen four stories (about fifty feet) below. An ambulance was called and a crowd gathered. Mrs. Alpert was barely conscious when medics retrieved her from the kitchen roof; they took her to Johns Hopkins Hospital, where she was found to have two broken legs and a fractured skull. She died two hours later.

Mrs. Alpert, with her history of depression, was clearly at risk, but on the whole, jumpers rarely show the usual warning signs associated with suicidal behavior. Compared to those who use other methods, jumpers are less likely to have known histories of mental illness. They have fewer previous suicide attempts. Jumping from a high place offers ease, speed, and the certainty of death, all of which encourage impulsive action. In general, however, perhaps because it is so resolutely final and demands a certain steely bravado, jumping accounts for only 2 percent of suicides worldwide. In the United States, firearms are the method of choice for men, and overdoses for women. In Europe, where firearms are more difficult to come by, the noose, for men, replaces the gun.

Another reason why the proportion of jumpers is so low is that the world’s highest suicide rates are found in extremely poor countries—for example, Guyana, Sri Lanka, Suriname, and Mozambique—places in which it is very rare to find high buildings that are accessible to ordinary people. As a result, those in rural agricultural areas resort to the method used by around 30 percent of the suicides committed in the world every year, and one of the most painful: drinking pesticides.

As might be expected, jumpers are much more common in densely populated cities known for their skyscrapers. The cities with the most high-rise buildings are also the cities with the highest proportions of jumping suicides. In Singapore, for example, 72 percent of suicides are jumpers; in Hong Kong, the figure is 50 percent; in New York, 23 percent. If you live in a town with no buildings higher than five stories, you are advised to select an alternative method. Suicide guidelines from the Hemlock Society, a right-to-die advocacy group, suggest that if your town has few buildings higher than four or five floors, jumping might not be the best way of taking your own life, since such relatively low leaps are not always fatal. If you have no choice but to jump from a fourth or fifth floor, the guidelines suggest, you should try to land on your head in order to maximize the chances of brain hemorrhage—the most frequent cause of death for suicidal jumpers. Gruesome as this may sound, according to physicist and philosopher Sascha Vongehr, in a blog entry devoted to the science of suicide, the half-second delay between brain receptor activity and awareness of experience means that the jumper dies before the impact of the landing. This speculation, obviously, cannot be confirmed.

While six floors should be enough to kill you, a drop of at least ten floors is advisable. In such circumstances, you do not have to concern yourself about what part of your body hits the ground first, assuming you have an adult body weight and that you land on a solid surface. Of course, there have been bizarre and miraculous exceptions—people have survived falls from airplanes without parachutes, while others have died after tripping over their shoelaces.

Yet are not all individuals exceptions to the statistical average? The French sociologist Emile Durkheim believed so. In his famous book on the subject, he wrote that “each victim of suicide . . . gives his act a personal stamp which expresses his temperament, the special conditions in which he is involved, and which, consequently, cannot be explained by the social and general causes of the phenomenon.” To make sense of the death of Rey Rivera, we must ask what the detective Auguste Dupin in “The Mystery of Marie Roget” describes as “the proper question in cases such as this,” which is “not so much ‘what has occurred?’ as ‘what has occurred that has never occurred before?’ ” For detailed particulars, the best place to begin is the autopsy report.

According to this document, Rivera hit the ground feet first. He had rather less external damage than one might expect after a fall of 118 feet, no doubt because his fall was broken around twenty feet from the ground, when he crashed through the roof of the former swimming pool. Still, the report makes nightmarish reading. These are the injuries found on Rivera’s body: two cuts to the forehead, one of which is four inches long; fractures to the nose and jaw; four ejected teeth; fractures to the cheekbone; multiple fractures to the skull from the top of the spine to the eye sockets, resulting in a brain hemorrhage; torn neck muscles, leading to further hemorrhage; cuts and bruises to the chest; two fractures to the collarbone; twenty-four broken ribs, which have punctured the heart and lungs and damaged the liver; a broken pelvis; cuts and tears to the right groin and testicle; many cuts and bruises on the torso in addition to two enormous lacerations on either side, one nine by seven inches long, and the other nine by four; torn skin on the front and back of the arms; legs cut so badly that muscles and tendons can be seen; the right leg broken in two places, with bone protruding through the skin.