the wife of the famous murderer Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen, was identified by a piece of her belly that clearly showed an old abdominal scar. Escaping the quicklime in which the rest of Mrs. Crippen’s body was destroyed, this fragment of flesh was later exhibited at Crippen’s trial, where it was passed around among members of the jury on a soup plate.
If, when leaving the Belvedere, you turn right and walk four blocks, you come to a bridge over the highway. I think of this bridge as the gateway to the Other City. Cross the bridge, and you are in a ghost world. Street after street lies empty. The houses are boarded up. Perhaps one in every twenty houses in the Other City is inhabited. Some are fully vacant, some semi-abandoned, some you just never know. A house with planks nailed over the doors and windows and trash piled ankle deep outside might turn out to have a pit bull on a leash that rouses up to bark and lunge at you as you hurry by.
There is something sublime about this ghost city, with its forbidding tracts of emptiness, derelict yards, and cul-de-sacs, its homes that could be crime scenes and perhaps are. I love the bright graffiti, the old brick, the flaking paint, the cracks and holes exposing the innards of buildings, the rusting fire escapes overgrown with ivy. Here in the mists and barrens of this shadow city, I’ve seen a man walking a fox on a leash, a thick black snake coiled up inside an abandoned baby buggy, a mural of crocodiles and Egyptian goddesses painted on the inside wall of a vacant garage. I have found bullet casings, human teeth, a dead cat, an intelligence scale for children, a rusting unicycle, a string of seed pearls, a Mexican silver-and-abalone letter opener, a typewriter, a collection of old tobacco pipes, and four cans of tinned mackerel from times gone by.
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