Chapter 9: Committing Suicide for the Second Time

Mid-September to Tuesday, February 22, 2005,

My vague plan - made back when I started pulling ahead of my 9th grade classmates - was to take as many Advanced Placement subjects as humanly possible in my senior year, which would make that year a busy one. But that was over two years away and what to do about the intervening period wasn't obvious. (For those of you who aren't American or who live in dimensions that use a different nomenclature, in most dimensions students in American school grades 9 through 12 are often called: freshmen (regardless of their gender), sophomores, juniors and seniors respectively. This dimension was typical in most school issues: those grade names, the dates school terms started and stopped throughout the year, class times, etc.)

Although I had done exceptionally well in my 9th grade final exams, I didn't bother to ask to be skipped another grade, as I was sure the Principal wouldn't agree to that. I'd encountered him around school a few times since he'd advanced me, and he clearly hadn't enjoyed being proved wrong. A better man, such as Mr. Barrett, would've celebrated my success, but the Principal wasn't a "better man". Whether he was bent out of shape because I'd somehow got the better of him via my mom, or he didn't appreciate that I'd inconvenienced him, or some other reason, I didn't know. But I did know that he scowled at me whenever we encountered each other so I didn't bother asking him permission to jump another grade.

I couldn't get motivated to think of what else I could do during the two years until 12th grade. I was going to commit suicide again sooner or later, and there was a 50% chance I'd be leaving this dimension, so why bother busting a gut to do anything? I knew that was probably poor logic, as whoever I merged with would probably think the same, but that "probably" gave me the excuse to be lazy. I was somewhat distracted by the thought of my dying and the new life that'd create for me, and I was more than a little lazy after the long summer vacation, so I basically did nothing about it.

I started 10th grade just as any other student would, although I was still only fourteen, my fifteenth birthday being a couple of months away in November. I hadn't thought things through as well as I should have - mostly because I hadn't bothered thinking things through at all - because I soon found myself bored stiff at school. There just wasn't enough challenge in 10th grade.

I spent some time in the school library reading ahead of this year's work to check that it was going to be as easy as I thought. It was. I read some of next year's textbooks too, and they didn't look hard either. I figured that as I'd done two grades of work last year, I could do two this year, so I decided to also work my way through the 11th grade material.

From the office and teachers, I got detailed information about what each of next year's classes were going to cover during their year, and I just worked my way through it at my own pace. Some subjects had a very detailed syllabus, others less so, but whatever they had guided my reading of their textbooks.

I found out what the 11th grade teachers' schedules were and I'd occasionally pop into their rooms before or after one of their classes to ask a specific question about something that had me blocked. I never took much of their time, and they were helpful enough. I even read through the 11th grade English material, but I mostly just read what was required rather than did anything about it. I certainly didn't bother writing any of the stupid assignments.

Even though I had two minds, it was still challenging. One way of looking at it is that I was doing two years' of work with two minds, so the equivalent of a year's work per mind. That would imply that it should be as challenging for my average intelligence as for any other average student, but that wasn't the case at all, for three major reasons:

• I didn't have to write assignments or take tests for my 11th grade work, so that saved a lot of effort.

• I could progress at my own pace, not the pace of the slowest student in the class.

• I could sit in a 10th grade class and pay attention to the teacher with one mind (actually less than half a mind because teachers are so repetitive and slow), while the other mind-and-a-half did my 11th grade work. I could get considerably more than two classes' worth of work done during one class.

Mostly I was doing 11th grade work to relieve my boredom while I waited for my next déjà vu, but I also vaguely intended that at the end of the year, I'd ask the Principal to let me take both sets of exams. Then we could look at my results and maybe get his permission for me to jump from 10th grade straight to 12th. If he refused, maybe I could talk him into me doing 11th and 12th grade simultaneously. I didn't particularly care either way because the next déjà vu would be coming along sometime around then.

I expected to wait a couple of years, and even then wasn't sure I'd go through with it on the first chance. Some circumstances were unacceptable, such as in the middle of dinner with my family; while other circumstances were undoable, such as in the middle of a PE class as it'd take me too long to get to my jar.

On February 22nd, only eight months after the movie theater déjà vu and fifteen months since my first merge, I was shopping for some new pants (I was fifteen now and my body had filled out a bit and grown a little taller), when I felt déjà vu.

(To avoid a VERY disjointed dialogue, I'm leaving out the VERY frequent and annoying breaks, restarts, confusions and repeats caused by the synchronization process. A verbatim transcript would be even more confusing because each of my minds tried talking to each of his, so there were often two attempted conversations going on simultaneously. Communication was almost impossible, and I'll spare you from having to read through pages of mess to extract a small amount of meaning.)

One Of My Minds: <Déjà vu!>

One Of His Minds: <Fuck! You win.>

Another Of His Minds: <Did you decide to make the winner whoever spoke first?>

One Of My Minds: <Yep. Can't say I'm sorry about that.>

Another Of My Minds: <There's no reason not to do this. Agreed?>

I was also looking for the nearest changing room. It was too far away. Kmart's clothing area was wide open, so hardly an ideal place to do what I wanted. I rushed toward a nearby corner to get behind a display rack, opening my hay fever bottle and dumping the poison into my hand as I moved; as was he.

One Of His Minds: <Agreed. Here goes nothing, that being our life.>

He was probably being unfair about his life, but if it helped him to think that way, I wasn't going to argue. The conversation had taken quite a while because of its being so disjointed, so we were now in position behind the corner rack.

One Of My Minds: <Yeah. Close to nothing anyway.>

One Of His Minds: <Ready?>

There was no need to answer as he could tell what I was doing and even feel my emotions, as it's a VERY intimate connection. I took a bite of a third of the poison. I'd made it up as a very moist paste so it would be easy to swallow and quick to take effect. He followed right behind my lead, biting and swallowing faster to get all of his dose down as quickly as possible.

I provided the other Mark with moral support while I rewrapped my poison and put it in a pocket, then got my antidote out, VERY careful that I had the WHITE cellophane-wrapped package and that it was a vial of liquid I held in my hand rather than a lump of paste. The poison shouldn't affect my mental faculties, but being careful seemed like a good idea.

The drug quickly took effect, dragging us down. I flopped back, leaning against the wall with the arm holding the vial supported by my knees as it held the antidote ready near my mouth. It got darker, colder, and with pins-and-needles increasingly severe at my extremities.

<I hope this works. I hope this works... > prayed all four of us.

I felt heavier, darker, weaker. Especially weaker, and weaker...

Then the déjà vu stopped. <Who is here?>

<Me.> | <Me.> | <Me.>

<YES!>

Never has the sound of multiple replies been so welcome. Actually, I'd never had multiple replies before, so it was the most welcome occurrence for that reason as well, but this isn't the time to quibble.

Four minds demanded, <QUICKLY, swallow the antidote!>

Four minds ordered my mouth to open and to tip the vial in. That went fine; the problem was that too much of my body was numb and I couldn't swallow. It was a life-or-death situation four times over, and we FIERCELY urged our throat to get it down.

We choked and coughed, spraying the liquid out of our mouth. Fortunately the hand holding the vial was still poised in front of it, and much of the liquid was blocked and ran back into my mouth where the choking continued. Outside of my control, the choking coughs suddenly included a gulping, and a goodly proportion of the antidote went down. The next cough sprayed some of it out my nose, but the next involuntary gulp swallowed some more. The cycle repeated a few more times, although all of the antidote was either swallowed or sprayed by then. We were hoping for mostly the former.

Several seconds had passed, and we hadn't, which was a VERY good sign. We started feeling less bad too, and after a few seconds were able to breathe easier, and even swallow voluntarily.

<If we ever kill ourselves again, we have to find a safer way!>

Our body was still very numb and we weren't going to be moving until most of that cleared, so we lay there conversing with ourselves, starting to find out what it's like to have four minds.

It quickly felt WAY different than having two. With two minds there's just one channel of communication. When one of us talked, the other listened. Pretty simple really. But now there were multiple lines of communication. One of the first things we discovered was that we could all 'hear' whatever thoughts any one of us wanted the others to hear. So the first deliberate experiment we did was to try to target that.

The experiment started with one of us saying, <Let's find out if one of you can send a message just to me, without the others hearing it.>

<I'll try, > said another one of us.

That trial was successful, which started a discussion about how the sender had differentiated who to send the message to.

He said, <I just tried to want it to go to the one of you that asked for the message.>

<We need to invent names for ourselves so we can keep track of each other.>

I'll spare you the silly naming jokes we couldn't resist exchanging. Normally my jokes are very funny, so the temporary loss of my high-quality humor must've been an undocumented side-effect of the poison.

Once we'd calmed down, we adopted a numbering scheme. We decided that "#1" was the 'owner' (original possessor) of the body we were in now, "#2" was the first one of us to merge with him, "#3" was the owner of the body who'd just died, and "#4" was the second mind to have joined #3. That scheme would work for any future merges. Presuming another merge happened some time in the future, then the four new arrivals would simply be their old names plus four.

[[I've already introduced you to this style of naming, although it was only invented at this point. Because it seemed natural at the time, I chose to use the name #1 for the Mark that I started this autobiography from the perspective of; but the scheme we just invented named that Mark #2. You should understand by now that it makes no real difference what we're called or who owns the body, so to be consistent with our future conversations, #2 is now the name of my autobiography's original Mark, and #1 the name of our current body's original owner.]]

Because our internal voices 'sounded' the same, we couldn't tell who was talking, so we agreed to prefix whatever we said with our name.

[[I've already adopted this format, for example, #1: <Hello.> Strictly speaking the "#1" should be inside the delimiters - <#1: Hello.> - as the name was part of what was sent, but I think it's easier for you to read with it moved to the outside as it's not part of the message's meaning and you're used to the speaker going outside the delimiters, for example: Tom said, "Hello."]]

We tried experiments where one of us sent messages to one, two or all three of the others, simply by mentally directing his communication to the names of the intended recipients, and it worked faultlessly and easily. Somewhat to our surprise because we'd imagined there would probably be quite a lot of confusion around this issue until we got ourselves very familiar with our new names/numbers. Apparently familiarity wasn't required. [[It was a learned skill, as we'd thought, but it took almost zero time to learn because it was trivially easy for our subconsciouses to keep deliberate, intentional track of each other.]]

Having four minds was a very different experience than two. It even felt somewhat like being in a crowd. Having so many people in my head would have been quite scary if not for trust. That feeling was there, in spades, right from the start. I'll repeat the description I used after the first merger, as it's so perfect: If someone suggests you do something, you often think carefully before you do what they want. Are they trying to take advantage of you? What will you get out of doing it? Questions like that. But you NEVER think those sorts of questions when you're acting on one of your own ideas. Your idea might be silly, even be wrong, but you're never trying to take advantage of yourself. The possibility is nonsense as you trust yourself unquestionably. We trusted ourselves that way - immediately, automatically, fully and unquestionably. It was a very good feeling.

We had some very mixed feelings about what had happened. Unlike the first accidental merge, this one was entirely deliberate, and with the full knowledge that one set of parents and sisters was going to be grieving soon. That the merge had worked was incredibly exciting and a huge relief, but it was also sad to think about the effects on the other dimension's family. We felt far more sympathy for them now than we had after our original suicides, when we'd barely felt any at all, such was my disconnection from each of my families at that time. To add to our guilt, the first time we'd suicided it'd been to make everything end, but now we'd done it to improve our own life, which made us feel guiltier about hurting one of our families. Obviously not enough to have stopped us, but the guilt was still there.

[In subsequent months, the four of us got to know our current family much better. From them we learned that for the months before this merge they'd liked me a great deal more than we'd thought. We sort of knew that, but we'd been so used to being a rejected loner that we hadn't made the effort to connect to them as we should have. If #3's family had been the same - and we were pretty sure it had been - then #3 and #4 shouldn't have suicided. They and we hadn't needed another merge to have a happy life; all we'd needed to do was make an effort to be social with our family(ies) and other people. So, over the months, we came to realize that #3's family had been hurt more than we'd thought at the time, and for a selfish reason too. But there was nothing we could do about that. #3's body was dead, and it was impossible to undo his suicide or go back.] [[The reality of the situation turned out to be somewhat stranger than what we thought.]]

We lay on the floor behind the clothing rack with thoughts buzzing through our head. With four minds, we could generate a LOT of thoughts.

"All you all right, young man?" asked an old granny leaning on her cane and peering down at me.

"Yes ma'am. Thank you. I just had a dizzy spell. I get them occasionally. They aren't serious and I have medication for them." I briefly waved the antidote vial. "I just need to stay down until it passes, which it nearly has."

We hadn't been thinking about our physical condition, being far too excited about the mental situation. But now that we checked, it was clear that the antidote was not doing a very good job of countering the poison's effects. We didn't appear to be dying, which we all agreed was a good thing, but the antidote was slow to reverse the other effects. We still felt numb, our extremities were tingling, and we didn't feel good enough to attempt to stand up.

Granny said, "I'll just go and get an assistant for you." And off she slowly went.

#3: <She'd have had an entirely different experience in the other dimension.>

While she was doddering away to get help, I put the vial and remaining poison back into my hay fever jar and put it in my pocket. Then I sat up to look better for whoever came next.

A salesman arrived and was very solicitous. He was particularly eager to call someone: his boss, emergency services, my parents, or anyone. I was particularly eager that he call no one. I assured him that I was very experienced with this problem, it was a small issue and was steadily going away. After a couple of minutes of refused offers to call for help, I got him to assist me to my feet and I gingerly walked far enough away for him to lose sight of me. It's not much fun walking when you've got bad pins and needles so I was happy to stop, lean on a display of electric frying pans, and wait for the recovery to progress further.

After a few more minutes, we thought it'd be a good idea if all four of us got on our bike and rode home. Hopefully I'd feel better after the next two stages of antidote.

Riding home was uncomfortable but it wasn't too bad; certainly not bad enough to keep me from getting to the permanent antidotes. I did that as fast as possible because I'd been doing my shopping after school. If I wasted too much time I wouldn't beat my parents home. It was worth aggravating my pins and needles to ensure I had privacy and wasn't prevented from doing what I had to.

When I got home I quickly checked out who was there. Carol was in her room doing homework, which was typical of her; and Donna was not at home, which probably meant that she was playing at a friend's place somewhere, which was also typical of her. Time for some digging then.

Digging with pins and needles is even worse than pedaling a bike, but I gritted my teeth to the jarring sensations on my foot and kept digging.

I was quite pleased to find that my cache of drugs hadn't been consumed by ravenous earthworms, or suffered any equally disastrous fate. I'd already written "2nd" and "3rd" on the vials to make it easy for me to do them in the right sequence. I'd read up on how to use a syringe, and I'd seen them used plenty of times on TV, so I simply sat down and got busy loading the syringe with the contents of the "2nd" vial.

I get queasy and faint at the sight of an operation on TV, and have to very quickly look away or I'd either pass out or throw up. Ditto for horror movies, which after fainting when I forced myself to watch one I've never watched again. But for some reason seeing my own blood doesn't worry me in the slightest. When my pimples had first gotten bad, my method for getting rid of them was to use one of Dad's razor blades to start a slice about a quarter inch above the pimple, inserting the blade deep enough into my skin to draw blood, and then sliding it down through the center of pimple and about a quarter inch beyond. Then I'd wash the cut under a faucet to get rid of all the pimple's contents, and wait for the cut to heal normally. I had no problem at all doing that to myself, and it did an excellent job of removing the pimples, until Mom discovered what I was doing and freaked out. Apparently it was "BAD", although I never found out why. I did find out that I wasn't allowed to keep doing it though. The cuts in my face took a few days to heal so I couldn't do it again without Mom spotting my spot-removal technique, so that was the end of that. Clearasil didn't work nearly as well and it cost a lot more, but that's what I'd ended up using.

Anyhow, my inexplicably not flaking out at the sight of my own blood meant I had no hesitation in sticking a syringe into myself. I clenched my fist and slapped my elbow's inside a few times to make a vein pop up, did the procedure to get air out of the syringe, then injected myself in the vein very carefully, because it'd be a pity to inject the antidote into somewhere other than a vein!